


The Wounding and Healing of Man

by northerntrash



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War II, Conscription and Evacuation, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-30 19:22:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 31,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3948658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a tin of letters tucked into his chest pocket, his heart aches for home, and all that is getting Bard through the stinking mess that is this war is the thought of his children laughing and happy, picking flowers in Thranduil's gardens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first contribution to the Hobbit Big Bang, and also my first time writing Barduil, so any feedback would be very much appreciated. 
> 
> I have been very luckily, and had a group of wonderful and supportive artists sign up to this prompt. The second part of this fic will be posted later on today, with links to published art (and I hope you're all as excited for that as I am).

THE WAR OFFICE, 23RD MARCH 1941

NOTICE OF PHYSICAL EXAMINATION

Please report to your local war office for a physical examination preluding official conscription.

 

* * *

 

CONSCRIPTION NOTICE TO ALL FAMILIES IN THE NORTH MANCHESTER AREA

 

* * *

 

The first time Bard says goodbye to his children for anything longer than a night or two was at a train station, the rain sleeting down outside the poor shelter of the roof overhanging the platform. It is a miserable day, but every day this Spring has been poor so far, stinging hail falling long into March, their narrow street freezing over long after the warmth of the season should have reached them. It has rained almost solidly for the last three days, and the streets are running with water, soaking into their shoes as they try and make the already long walk to the station last even longer, even a few extra moments together a blessing, right now.

At least they are going together, he thinks as he passes them their bags, the three small cases, battered and borrowed from neighbours, not even their own. Their own possessions are scant enough that they don’t need any more: the few things inside the cases rattle around as they take them from him, already on the train, the space inside another grim reminder of how little they have.

Now the train whistle is screaming, and Tilda is hanging out of the window of the carriage door. She looks scared and she looks defiant, angry and full of grief, her emotions too complex for someone that age to wear. Her goodbyes pour from her eyes as much as they do her mouth, and it hurts to have to wave goodbye to her.

He’d hoped, when they announced the new additions to the National Service act eighteen months earlier, that fathers who were the sole caregivers to their children would be exempt, but he had been wrong. Mothers in the same position, yes, but not fathers – he had hoped that the envelope, when it had arrived on his doorstep, would contain orders to join the men working in the coal mines, had almost expected that outcome, and the actual letter had left him half-faint for a moment as he had read it over.

There it was, in black and white, a declaration that he was deemed fit and young enough still to join the war effort on the western front. His children should have been evacuated months ago, really. Nearly all the children are gone, most of the schools are closed through lack of teachers. It was only a few well-placed old friends of his wife’s, old military types in the area, who had let Bard keep his children this long.

They had never approved of Bard, but they had loved his wife dearly, and would do anything that they could to keep what was left of her family together.

But not even they could keep him here at home forever, and people have been looking at him askance for months now anyway, wondering why he is still here, and not serving King and country overseas. There is anger in their eyes, and sadness too, for the sons and fathers that they have lost to gunfire, for the wives and daughters who have gone away to fight a war that doesn’t seem to be ending. He can’t hold their sorrow against them, but it has started to frustrate him none the less.

 _I have children!_ He wants to tell them, wants to yell aloud for the world to hear every time he sees someone with a white feather moving closer to him. _Two girls, and a beautiful boy, and they need me! They don’t have anyone else. We don’t have anyone else!_

He can’t make excuses now that his children are being sent to the countryside, for all that he wants to rage and demand that they make an exception for them. But the man always wants to be special: everyone always believes that they are so much more important than everyone else. But he isn’t, and though he doubts he’ll make any great difference on the front he knows that it’ll still be more than he would make waiting here.

Except to his children, of course. But he knows that they’ll be safer away from the crumbling residue of the city, from the air raids that wake them in the middle of the night, healthier away from the smoke pouring from ruined buildings and the factories that work at full pace now, day and night; they’ll be better off away from home. Too many bombings in the industrial city, too dangerous for little ones. And he doesn’t have enough, not really: they haven't introduced rationing yet but it is only a matter of time, what little they all have stretching thin, and he doesn’t have any land to grow anything extra – all they have is the stone flagged yard, narrow and dim, and a door that opens up onto the muddy canal bank. They’ll be going to a family with green land, and warm fires, and enough to spare.

And that’s okay, he tries to tell himself.

He’s been telling himself that every day ever since the inevitable came knocking.

It isn’t working.

He pretends that the smoke pouring from the engine is the reason that his eyes are stinging, and he leans up one last time to kiss Tilda through the open window; he reaches a hand in and squeezes Bain’s wrist, touches the edge of Sigrid’s jaw, the only part of them that he can reach through the narrow gap afforded to him by the rolled down glass in the carriage door.

He had pressed his father’s pocket watch into Sigrid’s hands as they parted, and she has promised to look after it. It came to him as the oldest, and now it is his turn to pass it on to his own first child, his beautiful girl. He knows that she will care for it. It’ll be better with her than it will be in the house, which is likely to be broken into whilst it is empty, by the desperate people left behind, and it will certainly be safer with her than on the front, with him.

Where he is going there won’t be any safety.

He knows that he has to go to war, even feels a small amount of pride at the fact that he would be following so many of his friends to the front, and he packs up the last of the house after he returns home trying only to think of that fact, rather than how empty the old place sounds without the running feet of three kids around the place. He takes his father’s old tobacco tin and slips the only photograph he has of his wife inside, the one where she started laughing half way through so that it blurred slightly around the edges, and regrets that he had never got around to getting a photograph done of his children.

 _When I get back,_ he tells himself, as he locks his door behind himself and heads off. _Soon._  

But it is a long time before he sees his children again, and when he finally does the last thing on his mind is finding a camera.

 

* * *

 

He’s sent off for military training, and he supposes that that isn’t the worst – at least he gets three square meals a day, something which was never a guarantee when he was working on the slowly declining canals, ferrying cargo from Liverpool to Manchester. Many a night he had gone hungry to make sure that first his wife, then his children had had enough to eat. He didn’t begrudge them that, but there was something satisfying about going to bed with a content stomach.

Paper was easy enough to get hold of here, and so he writes to his children almost every day. He’d been taught his letters, in his youth, but hasn’t had all that much call to use them since then, so it is slow going at first, before he gets the hang of it, and he’s certain that his work is peppered with mistakes that he doesn’t notice. Sigrid will, though, but then she’s a very smart girl, and he’s always made sure that she’d had her schooling, even when she wanted to quit so that she could work, and help him support the family.

“You’re my children,” he had told her, in that lilting accent that was part his Lancashire father’s, part his Irish mother’s. “And that means that I sacrifice certain things to make sure that you get everything that you want and need. Your job is not to notice that I do that, okay?”

She hadn’t really been okay with it, but at least she hadn’t left school.

 

 _April 29 th, 1941.  
Things here are not too bad, _he writes. _They’ve shaved my hair_  
_and the three of you would laugh yourself silly at the sight of me_  
 _now, but at least it means I won’t be catching lice from any of the_  
 _other men, and that is nothing to be sniffed at, I’m telling you._

 

He writes to them with amusing anecdotes about the other recruits, where they have all come from, how Keith from the canals is here too, and how good it was to have a friendly face. He keeps the letters light hearted and happy, because he knows that they’ll be worrying.

He doesn’t tell them much about the actual training, figuring that that is for the best, really. He doesn’t tell them how it felt to hold a weapon in his hands for the first time in his life, how he breaks a sweat at the thought of having to raise it against another human being. He doesn’t talk about the fact that he’s good at taking it apart, cleaning the components, reassembling it again. He’s the best in the group, and that makes him feel a little ill. He doesn’t mention how Keith cries in the night, the first time they sleep after they learn how to aim and fire, using sandbags as dummies. He doesn’t describe how much he hates the way that the gun oil gets under his nails, or the texture of the uniform against his skin, or how much he longs for his own bed, his own house, the sound of his children running around the place. He doesn’t tell them because he knows that it is only going to get worse. He certainly doesn’t tell them about the nights he spends lying awake, staring at the bunk above him, terrified for what is shortly to come.

He does tell them how much he misses them though, because though that is another painful truth it is one that he would never try to deny to them.

They write back and tell him that they miss him too, and they tell him about the place that they have been sent to stay. Greenvale is a strange old place, Sigrid writes, a grand manor house, and they felt out of place at first, resentful that they have been sent away from their home and their father. She sends a sketch, and it doesn’t actually look all that grand or imposing – though Bard supposes that it would be to his children, who have only ever lived in their four-room little house that backs on to the canal. In comparison, this place might seem like Buckingham Palace.

She describes it in length, from the polished wood of the staircase to the kitchen cook, from the cat they keep to catch the rats, to the bedrooms – _and we have a bedroom each, Da!_ – though he suspects that Tilda is already sneaking into her sister’s room and bunking up with her, if he knows his girls. It sounds like a nice old place to be sure, the house of a gentrified landowner, not quite aristocrat enough to be suffering at the slow decay of the lords of the land, but wealthy enough to support three additional children, apparently without too much concern.

There is just a father and a son living in the house, according to Sigrid’s thorough letters – a Mr Thranduil, who is a little odd but kind enough, though not very friendly, and his son Legolas, who it seems that Tilda is already following around with mopey eyes. He’s about Bain’s age, and eager to show them around the village, around the gardens, on the days when the rain doesn’t force them into staying inside.

She tells him that she keeps time on his watch, sets it every day to the great grandfather clock in Mr Thranduil’s hall, and that when she can’t sleep she rests it on the pillow next to her, listening to the quiet tick of it.

They never tell him that they are happy there – he knows that that is to make him feel better, rather than because they are not. He can tell that they are. Sigrid sketches little drawings in the margins, and Bain details every stream and tree that he and Legolas ford or climb, and Tilda writes down the name of every horse in every field that she comes across – most of them, he’s sure, made up by her, because he can’t imagine any sensible country farmer calling their horse ‘Canalboat’.

Or ‘Leap-frog’, for that matter.

They’re good kids, and he feels a little proud of them. They’re too sensible not to make the best of things, and it seems like they’ve landed on their feet in the house of this Mr Thranduil. Whoever he is, as long as his children remain happy, then he’ll forever have Bard’s thanks.

He’s supposed to get a day off once the far-too-brief training was over, but he hangs back from mentioning it to them, though he isn’t entirely sure why. He figures that he’ll just go and surprise them (he has the address, after all, and the village they are staying in has a train station). But in the end he is glad that he doesn’t mention it. The day before training is due to finish they are told that they are needed immediately on the front, that all leave is cancelled indefinitely.

“The final push, men!” calls the jocular officer at the front of the room, but his eyes are lined and tired, and his voice lacks some of the enthusiasm that Bard suspects that it must have held only a couple of years before. This war has gone on far longer than anyone would have thought. Even the most patriotic of men are starting to sway in the face of a seemingly endless fight.

He’s shipped off before he even has much time to think about what is going to come next, but he does have time to scribble off one last letter, cramming it through the slot in the post room early the next morning, just before they are due to assemble. He hopes that they won’t be too disappointed.

 

_August 27 th, 1941._   
_We’re off to the front today! It’ll be good to finally be done with all_   
_of this training and get to where the action is. I’ll write to you_   
_as often as I can, but we’re told that paper is short out there,_   
_and that it may take a while for post to get through, so don’t fret_   
_if you don’t hear from me for a while. Remember to be good, and_   
_that I love all three of you, very dearly. Stay safe, and strong, and happy._   
_All my love, Da._

 

* * *

 

Their letters become even more vivid, the longer that they stay in Greenvale. He doesn’t know if that is because they are trying to cheer him up, or because they are just genuinely enjoying themselves, and he doesn’t ask, doesn’t really want to know the answer. The three of them are full of stories, of scrumping in apple orchards with their guardian’s son, of fishing in tiny brooks, having picnics in meadows. Mr Thranduil buys Sigrid a box of watercolour paints (something that Bard had always been trying to save up for himself, only every time he got close he needed to spend it on something else, on a bill or roof repairs or on food when there are slow weeks on the canal), and she sends him paintings of all the new things that she sees. Tilda presses wildflowers, and tucks them in the envelopes. Bain writes detailed and vivid descriptions of every friend he has made, every girl that he develops a crush on (and sometimes it seems like there is a new one every week).

He’s glad of those letters, he really is.

Some days, they are the only thing that gets him through.

The front is not what he expected.

The posters and radio broadcasts had told stories of camaraderie, of beating back the enemy on every front, of glorious victories, of raising the union flag to rousing choruses of _God Save the King_.

It isn’t like that at all.

Men die every day, men that he sleeps and eats beside. He knows all of their names, but after a while he starts making himself forget them, because that is the only way that he can really bring himself to get up every day. Keith bums him cigarettes, and though he doesn’t have much for a taste for them he smokes them anyway, for something to do. Three of the men he trained with are killed in their first month, one from standing on a landmine and another from enemy fire; the third is taken by infection from a minor wound in one of the field hospitals.

It’s not a lot, in the grand scheme of things. It’s only him and Keith left, by the end of 1941.

But they progress, slowly enough. The Red Army suffers as many losses as the British, and the German people are not unaffected, either. Stories come through the wireless every evening of bombings in Berlin, the shooting of men marked out with stars, deaths upon countless deaths. Bard sits there are lets the stories wash over him, but after a while he simply stops listening. There is too much to take in, otherwise. War is declared on Japan, but it is so far away that Bard finds himself unable to care. They get a wash of new recruits when conscription finally stretches to cover all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty, and Bard consoles himself with the fact that he would have ended up here anyway, no matter what.

It isn’t much of a consolation, if he is going to be honest with himself.

They’re told that the Americans have joined the war, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. It’s still something to celebrate though, so they do, as best as they are able.

He spends New Years in a trench, the water soaking through his boots and rats screaming somewhere nearby. There is a new recruit that seems to have taken a liking to him. His name is Mickey, and he’s young and naïve, still convinced that they are making a difference, that everything is going to be alright. In some ways it is sweet to hear, but in other ways it just makes Bard feel even worse. Mickey seems able to get hold of anything though, rationing aside, and they share a bottle of liquor so rough that Bard isn’t convinced that it wasn’t distilled in the sink of some army hospital, bottled right here on the front. It tastes like death, but so does the air, full of smoke and the stench of decay, so he drinks it anyway. It burns, but that’s fine, really.

There are no celebrations. Keith’s watch is old, and he’s had to restart it several times, so they don’t even know if the time is right anymore. They raise their hands in a salute when the hands reach midnight anyway, and pass the bottle around again.

He hasn’t seen his children for almost a year, and he misses them, a constant ache in his chest that won’t leave him alone.

 

_January 10 th, 1942._   
_Things are going well, my loves. I’m tired and cold, but that is only to be_   
_expected! The war goes well, and I haven’t been injured any more than a_   
_few scrapes and bruises. I hope you’re all safe and warm, and that 1942_   
_sees us together again._

 

They lose Singapore, and there is nothing any of the wireless newscasters can do to make it sound anything less than an utter failure, perhaps the worst in British military history. It saps the moral on the Western front, and they stop talking about it on the broadcasts almost immediately, as soon as they realise. Letters from home suddenly stop mentioning coal and electric, as if someone, somewhere, is making sure that there isn’t anything about it to read. Bard is suspicious, but he doesn’t bother voicing his concerns.

Another bundle of letters arrive from home, and there is a fourth this time, one that he had not expected.

It is polite, but a little cold, and is signed ‘ _Mr T Kingson, of Greenvale_ ’. The mysterious Mr Thranduil has finally made himself known, though he doesn’t have a whole lot to say. Bard’s children are in good health, and are very well behaved. He is doing his best to accommodate them as best he can, and he thought that Bard might like to know. If he would like, Thranduil would be willing to send him reports of how they are doing, the minor things that a parent cares about that a child would never think to mention – school reports and colds, that sort of thing. Unspoken but implied is the fact that Thranduil himself would wish to hear such things about his son.

Bard finds it a little odd that he doesn’t just spell out his love for his child plainly, but he supposes that the wealthier among them can be a little stingier with their affection. Perhaps it is because they can afford to give their children other things, instead.

He tries, and fails, not to feel resentful.

It’s a strange letter, short and to the point, tucked in between the ones from his children, and it has come rather late considering that his children have been in Thranduil’s care for almost a year. He sends back that he would like to hear about them, if Thranduil is willing, and he doesn’t bother to say much more.

He focuses instead on the letters from his children. They must have been written back in January, but they don’t arrive until March. They talk about the snow, and the things that they build in it. Tilda found it all a great adventure, apparently.

He breaks three fingers on his right hand in May, and he is finally given an opportunity for leave, if only because he can’t wield a weapon until it is healed up. He travels back to Britain on a ship ferrying those too wounded to continue, and tries not to think about the way that some of them scream in the night, begging for mercy from a God that he is no longer sure if he is able to believe in. He doesn’t even bother going back to Manchester, back to his house – everything about that life feels a little strange to him now. As soon as he is released – and it is only for a day – he gets straight on a train and heads to York. He barely recognises the blackened ruins of the city, and tries not to think about what his own city might look like, now. He waits for an hour at the station for the connecting train, and tries not to breathe in the air too deeply.

It stinks of tar, and the acrid smell of fire consuming things that should never have been burnt.

The train takes him through the countryside at a slow and winding pace that leaves him more and more impatient with every passing minute. But it is his children’s turn to stand on the platform this time, and as soon as they see him they bellow their excitement, running towards him in the train smoke and throwing their arms around him.

He sinks to his knees, and tries his hardest to hold all three of them at once, but _my god,_ they’ve grown so much just in the last year.

It hurts to see them, but it is a good pain.

They walk him around the village, a pleasant enough place that feels oddly empty with half of its occupants gone off to war. He feels still and uncomfortable in his uniform, and like something of a fraud when the women working the fields nod and smile at him, as if he is something to be proud of. This uniform isn’t him – this soldier isn’t _Bard_ , not the man who has worked the canals since he was a child, not the man who married his sweetheart, not the man who keeps his children’s drawings pinned on the wall in the places where the wallpaper has started to peel.

Tilda shows him all her favourite hiding places, the best trees to climb: Bain regales him with the books that he has read from Mr Thranduil’s library, _and it has so many books in it Da, more than I’ve ever seen in my entire life!_ Sigrid is mostly quiet, but she keeps her arm linked through his the entire time, as if she’s afraid that he might just disappear.

He goes up to the house before he leaves too, partly because he feels like he should but mostly because the children want to show him where they live now. It takes them longer than he expects to walk through the gardens, beautifully rambling as they are. He had pictured manicured lawns and neat beds of flowers, but instead he is pleasantly surprised by the old, twisting trees, the long grass, the sprawling flowers that pour over the borders onto the cracked stone flags of the pathway. There is a wildness about it, and he wonders if that is deliberate, or just because all of the men that might have worked as gardeners have left.

Sigrid’s drawing was quite accurate: it’s a beautiful old house, but as large or noble as Sigrid had described, though he does have to suppress the desire to go around to the back entrance. The windows are large though, to let in the light, and there is ivy growing up the old stone walls.

They lead him through the old, tall doors into a wide hallway, light and airy in the afternoon sunlight. It is too grand for the likes of him, really, but the children have barged in anyway, laughing, pulling him after them, and it has been so long since he has heard their laughter that he can’t bring himself to chastise them.

The door to what looks like a parlour is open, and it is then that Bard finally lays eyes on the owner of the house, the surrogate father to his children, the strange man with whom he has exchanged barely a handful of letters, all perfunctory, polite but cool. He’s a tall man, ash-blonde hair pushed back across his head, longer than fashion dictates, so that it brushes his collar, his features fine and handsome rather than strong. There is a certain power in the set of his shoulders that is evident even when he is sitting though, and he nods at Bard.

“Thranduil Kingson,” he says, introducing himself, but he doesn’t bother to stand, which smarts a little. Bard nods in return, aiming for polite but well aware that he is coming across closer to rude than he intended.

“Bard Bowman,” he answers, and something that might have been a smile flickers across Thranduil’s mouth for a moment, before his eyes turn instead to the children, something warm and fond and genuine in his gaze that hurts even worse than the snub of the introduction.

He cares for them, and that makes it very difficult to hate him, even though Bard would sorely like to.

Tilda clings to him when he has to go, and Bain’s lip starts to wobble, even though he has been adamant for years that he is too old to cry anymore. Sigrid kisses his cheek, and makes him promise with a fierceness so like her mother’s that he’ll come back soon.

It’s a difficult promise to make, because he knows that he might not be able to keep it.

He does it anyway, because he’s never been able to deny his girl anything.

 

* * *

Half his squadron is dead a week after he returns to the front, caught between enemy and friendly fire, left in the wrong place at the wrong time when communications fail and orders to move don’t come through in time. He’s pressed up against a tree, Keith is flat on his face in the mud beside him, and there is nothing that they can do as the bodies fall but stay as still as they possibly can and wait to die.

They creep back to their lines once night falls and the gunfire stops. Mickey’s made it too, though God only knows how, and his face is white, his eyes wide with a sudden fear. He’s always been too light-hearted, has Mickey, has never really understood his own mortality until today. But he’s shaking when they finally find a place to bunk down for the night, and Bard falls asleep to the sound of his crying, and the thought of his children laughing in dappled sunlight.

The days pass, and then the months after that. Soon another New Year goes by, another winter sets its claws in deep, and the letters become even more sporadic than they were before. All leave is still cancelled indefinitely, but they feel the need to keep reminding the soldiers, even though they couldn’t ever really forget. He understands it, even if he hates it. Soon enough it has been another year since he saw his children, and he doesn’t know how he has survived this long, when the days seem to stretch for years until men start to pray for the sunset. T

There is a note of sadness in the letters from his children now, and they have stopped asking him when he will be coming home next, as if they are sick of not having an answer, sick of opening each reply only to hear the same old bad news _, I don’t know, my loves, and I wish that I did._

Bo arrives with a new shipment of recruits, and he joins their little band. He’s all of six foot five, wiry as hell, and the son Jamaican immigrants, a hint of the West Indies in his cockney accent that means he can’t help but sound upbeat even when he probably isn’t. Bard warms to him immediately, and not just because he tends to sing under his breath, low sweet songs from the radio back in England, and lilting gentle melodies that his mother taught him, from her own home.

Bo gets a lot of letters, too. All his brothers are out here on the front, and they write to each other on a daily basis, letters getting passed along the front moving a lot quicker than the ones that have to wait for shipment back home. But Bo understands the way that Bard keeps his letters close, understands the way that they have become a lifeline to him, doesn’t mock him in crueller moments for the way he will stare at a watercolour of a field he’s never seen for hours at a time, slowly and silently crying.

God, he misses home.

Not his old house, not really.

Home is where his children are.

Thranduil continues to write him letters, the occasional update, terse and to the point. It is always the more practical stuff that his children forgets, and Bard tries hard not to hate Thranduil for the fact that he can do that, for the fact that he is safe at home with Bard’s children and no part in the stinking mess that is this war. Bard writes that, one day, in a moment of self-indulgent anger that he knows he can barely afford, demands to know why Thranduil is safe at home when he has to be here. There is summer rain coming through the soles of his boots from a late afternoon shower, and there is blood soaked so deep into his jacket that he can’t get it off, and he can’t remember who it came from, and damn it if none of this is _fair._

 

 

_September 10 th, 1942._   
_Are you a coward? Or are you just wealthy enough to buy your way_   
_out of the war? Or is there something that I don’t know about you?_

 

He sends it off, along with the gentle, dishonest letters to his children, and regrets it immediately the next day.

He doesn’t think Thranduil will bother to reply, and as the days stretch on to weeks, and then to a month, he begins to wonder what his moment of anger will have cost his children. Thranduil already provides so much for them, and if he takes offense to Bard’s letter, then that could be the end of that. He tries to forget about it, because his father always told him that there was no good worrying about things that you can’t change or learn any more about, but it proves as impossible to ignore as the grazes from bullets in his helmet, the origins of the meat that the rat nearby is chewing on, his bright eyes staring disconcertingly at Bard.

He re-reads the fragments of letters that he has kept, instead. He doesn’t get to keep many of their letters: paper is scarce here, and so he writes on the backs of theirs, and sends them home. He’s asked Sigrid to keep those letters for him, though, that evidence of correspondence, that despite the distance between them there was still some invisible line keeping them connected.

The tin is full of the pages that he did keep, though, where they drew pictures, the ones that make him smile, or sometimes weep. He keeps them in his father’s old tobacco tin, the one with the faded painting of a smiling sailor on the front, the one in which he keeps the photograph of his wife and the key to his front door back home, the few things he has left to ground him.

He buries himself in his correspondence. He used to find reading a chore, but now it is his only solace.

But then a letter comes back from Thranduil, tucked in the single large envelope that contains the notes from his children, the pressed flowers, the paintings and the drawings. The letter has been opened once already, by someone checking the information, but he has stopped caring about that a long time ago. He reads through the ones from his children, as slowly as he is able, making himself savour each word, knowing full well that it might be a months before he has anything new from them to look at.

Thranduil’s letter he avoids, for as long as he can, until he can’t bring himself not to look at it any more.

It’s a little longer than the normal ones, the first half addressing the usual topic of Bard’s children. The second part is shorter, and the letters are shaky in places, as if his hand has wavered.

 

_November 2 nd, 1942._   
_I served myself, in my youth, for many years, but suffered an_   
_injury. They have no need for a cripple on the front, I think. They_   
_will, no doubt, be sending enough of them home as it is._

 

He doesn’t mention Bard’s frustration, nor his rudeness at accusing Thranduil of buying himself out of conscription. Bard himself doesn’t comment on it in his reply either, though his hand hovers over the back of the paper for a while, trying to work out what it is he could even say at this point.

The guilt gnaws at him, but he doesn’t know what else to do.

The year continues to pass, slowly. 1943 is a strange year. Germany surrenders at Stalingrad, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to their morale on the Western front, although Bard supposes that he wouldn’t really know from this side of the line, anyway. The French Resistance begin to pass messages to the Allied troops, sneaking supplies and provisions over to their side of the line. The first reports of massacres in Poland reach them, and for a while that steels there resolve, but there is only so long a man can stand firm when he’s knee deep in mud and the blood of fallen friends.

Bard doesn’t feel like himself anymore, anyway. This isn’t his body. This isn’t him.

His children miss him.

The longing for home has reached an almost desperate pitch.

But Thranduil’s letters are calm, as if Bard has just gone away for the weekend. He seems to know exactly the tone that Bard needs to hear, as if none of this is happening at all.

 

_March 16 th, 1943._   
_Tilda was asked to sing in the church choir, and despite her_   
_initial protests, I think she is happy about the prospect._

 

Things are starting to turn, slowly but surely, if the wireless is to be believed. First Italy declares war on Germany, then the Red Army frees Kiev. These changes are repeated so often that Bard grows sick of the sound of them, sick of the promise of some end to this war, and end that seems so impossible to him here. How much longer can all of this go on? How long will he have to bear it, now?

The nights grow longer once more, the days grow colder again, though the spring and summer had been so poor this year that they had barely been worth mentioning.

Bo continues to sing, though his voice is growing quieter now.

Mickey develops a cough that he just can’t seem to shift, though it doesn’t stop him from smoking as many cigarettes a day as he can get his hands on.

Keith goes days without speaking, sometimes, but Bard doesn’t talk all that much anymore anyway, so he doesn’t have much of a right to comment on that.

They drink French wine slipped to them by the resistance, brandy sometimes too, when they get their hands on it, and it is a damn sight better than the shit that Mickey used to find for them.

 _I don’t want to die,_ he breathes against the rim of the bottle. _Please don’t let me die._

Time continues to pass, but the war on the front never seems to change, never seems to alter. Everything always stays the same, just more monotonous days of smoke and death.

But the one thing that has changed, it seems, is the relationship between him and Thranduil. That first, unforgivably rude letter has broken some unspoken barrier between them, and suddenly the strange guardian of his children has begun to open up, to tell Bard about himself unbidden, as if this is as much a form of therapy for Thranduil as it was for him.

There is a certain weight to his letters, and they anchor Bard down in their own way, as well.

 

_22 nd June, 1943._   
_I did not rise to meet you, when you came, as my leg causes_   
_me great pain still, and some days it is a struggle. Please_   
_know that it wasn’t a slight. At least, not one given deliberately._

 

That gives him a comfort, though it isn’t an apology of any kind.

He swallows at the thought of what must have happened to Thranduil’s leg, at the mention of shell shards. He’s seen what happens to the men that go into the hospitals on the front. Infection sets in before they’ve even had a chance to treat the injury.

Perhaps it is a ruin of scar tissue, twisted flesh.

Perhaps that’s better than the ruin of mind, the type of broken heart that Bard is slowly growing to understand will be all that this war will leave him with.

Thranduil’s signature is graceful, he thinks to himself as he stares at the letters, not really noticing that he spends as much time holding them as he does the ones from his children now, not quite understanding yet that these letters are as vital to him as the others that come in the same envelope. The signature is just like his children’s new foster father: elegant, refined. His own name is a scrawl, barely legible he’s sure. ‘ _All my love, Da’_ comes out easily enough for his children, but it is a struggle each time to know how to end the ones to Thranduil. He settles in the end, on ‘ _Yours, B. Bowman,_ ” but knows that it isn’t enough to convey what he is feeling, isn’t enough to pass on the gratitude he wants to express for the comfort that these letters bring him.

Because some of the letters are Thranduil opening himself up, as if he were just some dusty old book on a shelf that has been aching for a chance to let someone read it, has fallen open on the most important pages the moment that someone touched it. But other parts of the letters – because the letters are growing longer now, two or three pages each time – still talk about his children, only they are much warmer now, much more affectionate, as if Thranduil is no longer afraid of showing how much he cares for Bard’s children.

Bard likes that – it is reassuring, in a way, to know that his children are in a place where they are loved.

Some of them make him laugh, and that is a rare thing to happen these days – he keeps those letters, even though he knows that he should use the paper, preserve it for as long as he can. There is never enough of anything, out here. They reveal a cool and caustic wit that Bard had not expected from Thranduil, a humour that is somehow sharp and gentle at the same time. It is appreciated, far more than he thinks Thranduil will ever know.

 

_18 th October, 1943._   
_Bain and my son decided to try to ford a stream in the garden, and_   
_they were very successful, although it did unfortunately mean_   
_that half the vegetable beds were flooded. I console myself_   
_with the fact that most of the produce had been harvested._

 

’44 arrives with as little celebration as the previous years, and he realises with a hollow grief that he arrived on the front in ’41, just how long it has been since he first was shipped out.

It’s a wet Spring that year, and that makes it even more miserable: he can’t remember the last time that he had dry feet, and starts to envy the men who run the tanks, because despite their stifling and stinking conditions, at least they are kept out of the mud.

The Allies bomb the soul out of Berlin, and sometimes Bard believes that he can hear the screaming from London, from Berlin, from Paris, echoing around his mind at night, but he knows that it is just the whimpering of the men lying around him in the dirt and the dark. All the stories on the radio are of the bombing of German cities, and he knows that he is supposed to feel encouraged by that, but it doesn’t make him feel anything at all.

But there was nothing really to do about the bad weather and low morale. They were finally making progress, pushing forwards, and by the time August came they had reached Paris, finally liberated the capital, and they celebrate with more French brandy and bread with real butter, the people empting their hidden stores in a gratitude that he doesn’t feel like he deserves.

He tells Thranduil this, tells him how wrong it feels to constantly have people telling him that he is brave, when in reality he knows that he is nothing but a coward. He isn’t strong. He wouldn’t be here, if he didn’t have to be. If he had a choice he would be back at home, with his children, pretending that none of this was any of his concern and sleeping easily at night. 

Thranduil’s response is comforting, but at the same time almost makes him feel worse about himself.

 

_31 st September 1944_   
_I have faced the trials of war myself. You may not think of_   
_yourself as brave, but know that any man that stays, month_   
_after month, that does not run away from it all, is brave in truth._   
_Even the men that run, that cannot bring themselves to stay_   
_another day, are brave too, even if we deny them that description._   
_All people in war are brave, because every person has the potential_   
_for bravery inside them. And war is the time that the potential_   
_comes to fruit, even if it will grow to be a bitter one._

 

They push on, and in the October they finally cross the border into Germany. It doesn’t feel as dramatic or as important as it should: instead, it is just a step from one field into another, nothing more than a little more movement east. He wouldn’t even have noticed had some officer not stopped to stake a flag in the ground, the union flag sagging against the pole in the still day. An American flag is put down too, and a French one, and they all stand lifeless, no wind there to lift them high and proud.

They continue marching.

Winter sets in proper, again, and Bard wonders at the fact that he remembers the winters so clearly, but that spring and summer always seem to pass him in a blur, as if the better half of the year is just some strange dream before the colder months arrive.

He wakes up one morning and finds that a lacework of frost is decorating his helmet.

He smokes a cigarette, taking long, slow breaths, deep and sure, his hands shaking as he does so.

He hasn’t been able to stop them shaking recently, and he’s starting to wonder if they ever will.

They march through the day, eat meagre rations, and take the outlying villages that they come across. It is a miserable existence. He rereads his letters and tries to believe them when they tell him that the war will be over soon – in weeks, in fact! All they need to do is take Berlin, and the war will be over.  Bard has never had much schooling, he’s never been much of a geographer, but he’s pretty sure that Germany is bigger than all that, and that it is going to take them more than a fortnight to reach the capital.

The boys have starting singing though, so he joins in, even though he can’t bring himself to feel particularly happy.

The only thing that makes him smile, really, is his tin, kept close against his heart.

The thoughts of his children.

The quiet confidence of Thranduil’s letters.

Home is far behind him, now, Bard thinks as they march on enemy soil. How sure is he that he will make it back there?

 

_November 9 th, 1944._   
_There is a boy in the village that keeps leaving Sigrid flowers from his family hot  
house, but _ _as I’m sure you’d like to know, she throws them out the window_   
_every time, and does not seem to have any interest in him at all._

* * *

 

The days are monotonous: they’d push further, moving ever closer to Berlin, taking small villages and larger towns, a constant grey blur of ruined fields and smoking buildings. Bard can no longer tell if the colour has been washed out of the earth, or if it is just him that can’t see them any more: everything seems pale, and dull. Even the blood pooling around the dead bodies that they come across, lining the streets, have dulled to a dark red-grey-black, a shade that was starting to seem no different from the shadows in his dreams, or the clouds in the sky above them. This was almost worse than it had been before, when death had been an almost-certainty: they met few enemy soldiers now, and those that they did come across were as tired as Bard himself felt, pale and scared, and young – so very young.

Victory was in reach, but no one felt particularly enthusiastic about it anymore. Perhaps the American soldiers did, a little more, but they hadn’t been here as long. For the most part they raised their flags outside each town hall with little enjoyment. There was some satisfaction to burning the Nazi flags in turn, but even that quickly faded.

The land around here just felt… hopeless.

Another New Year came and went, with much less celebration than the last one. This night is full of a strange sort of anger, some deep and violent potential that scares Bard. He watches the men out in the square of the town they have taken, their teeth bared and their laughter brittle. They make him nervous, and he stays in the room of the old and empty house that him and his friends have been drinking in for the rest of the night.

1945 now, and they still weren’t at Berlin.

Most of the German people had fled, but sometimes there were those who hadn’t, families who couldn’t afford to leave, those who simply weren’t able, or were so far in denial that they didn’t even look up when the soldiers knocked at their windows. It hurt to watch the way that their faces fell when they saw them march in to the towns, hurt even more to see the way that the victorious allied soldiers treated the towns, and the people left in them.

So he would volunteer to secure the town perimeter each time, knowing that most of the soldiers wanted to be in the thick of taking each location, so that they would get first dibs on any loot or women that they could find. Cigarettes were a valuable commodity these days – and that was nothing compared to the demand for chocolate or dirty magazines. Bard had tried one, once, but had felt nothing as he had leafed through the pages, as if he himself barely existed anymore.

A few of his friends – no, his brothers now – joined him on occasion, though he never asked whether it was to keep him company or because they felt the same way that he did. He doesn’t want to hear that it is the former, doesn’t want to know that he is the only one who has been left this way, the only one quietly falling apart each day that they get closer to Berlin.

Keith claps him around the shoulders, the scar that was fresh the first week that they were here faded now, a pale brown rather than red, and they head off. The fields that must once have been lush with growth have been churned to mud by tanks, barbed wire from fences that have been torn down curling through the great trenches left by the treads of those war machines, gleaming bright and silver from the rain the night before. There are the black husks of defeated tanks too, from both sides of the war, strewn here and there, left abandoned in the middle of the field. The fires that had wrecked them are long burnt out, and they are innocuous, weeds already starting to grow again around their tracks.

There is a dead woman down in the mud. The back of her head has been shot out. Bard wonders, just for a moment, who she was, and why she has ended up here, face down in the dirt, with only the crows to mourn her.

Mickey is older now, emotionally as well as in terms of age, but he’s still the youngest of them in every way that counts, and he stares up at the sky, obviously affected by the sight, as he always is, even after so many years.

Bo is whistling that slow, sad song, the one that he always comes out with when he’s feeling like shit. Bard knows it as well as he knows his own face in the mirror, even though he doesn’t know what it is called: they’ve had a lot of reasons to feel like death over the years that they’ve known each other.

Everything is still. In the distance, there is gunfire, probably from some town further along the front, the sound carrying far in the afternoon. There is no wind.

There is no birdsong.

Someone in the town behind them laughs, and a bottle smashes.

He reaches into his pocket. It has been months since a letter from his family came through to him, but he had taken the last one from Thranduil out that morning, and read through it. His children had been involved in the church Easter celebrations, and apparently Sigrid had been chosen to do a reading above all the other girls in her class. He tries to imagine them: Tilda with an Easter bonnet, Bain trying not to laugh on the back pews of the church, Sigrid standing serenely at the pulpit.

He’s there, with them in his mind, and they leave the church together, walking along beautiful country lanes to some great garden, where they sit in the sunshine and laugh: Sigrid sings for them, and Tilda and Bain challenge each other to climb the highest tree that they can see.

They’ve never had a garden in their entire lives: their house backs on to the canal and that is about as much nature as they’ve ever had.

There isn’t even a local park; the only times they’ve seen nature is down at their Grandfather’s allotments, or the odd day he’s been able to take them out of the city.

It must be Thranduil’s gardens that he’s trying to picture, he thinks to himself as he follows his friends through the mud, checking each half-ruined barn and outhouse, in case there are any enemy soldiers waiting to spring a trap (though with each passing day, that threat grows less and less likely).

The last lot of papers had come with a letter from Thranduil’s son, as well: it had just been half a page, scribbled, promising Bard that he and Bain were looking after the girls, and that he wished Bard well.

 

_10 th February, 1945._   
_And I hope you can come home soon, sir, and that_   
_you remain safe. I have heard so many good things about_   
_you, it would be an honour to get to meet you. I hope_   
_you do not mind me writing to you – it is just that_   
_I have become such friends with your children,_   
_and I know how much they love and worry about you._

 

He’s a bright boy, according to his father, but unfathomably curious. Bard’s own children talk about him all the time in their letters. Bain had always wanted another brother. It’s a sweet note, a little oddly formal to have come from a child, but he appreciates it, almost as much as he appreciates the letters that Thranduil continues to send, laced with an acerbic humour and genuine affection for all four of the children in his care. It’s been months since he sent his reply, and he hopes that he gets another one soon.

Bard strokes the thick, expensive paper that Thranduil’s letters always come on, the softest thing that he’s felt in quite some time.

He wonders what his children are doing right now.

Perhaps they’re paddling in a stream somewhere; perhaps they are picking wildflowers.

He doesn’t remember anything after that: just the way that his friends laughed, the way that his fingers stroked the metal of the tin, the weak sunlight forcing itself through the heavy, overcast skies. By the time he wakes up, hours later, his ears still ringing from the explosion, those friends were all dead, and he’d been taken to the nearest field hospital.

But all he could think about, for the brief moment he woke up before the pain set in, was of long grass, and the taste of bitter apples.

 

* * *

 

 

They’re talking to him, something about his arm, but he doesn’t understand their words: the only thing he can understand is that they’re cutting his jacket off him, and no he doesn’t give a damn about his arm, _they can’t take that jacket away from him-_

He’s reaching for it, like a madman, and blood splatters across his face from an injury on his arm that suddenly hurts _oh god it hurts like hell what have I done, what has happened-_

But they can’t take that tin away from him, he needs that tin, it is stupid and he knows that it shouldn’t matter, but his letters are in there, his faded photograph, the smudged drawings of apple orchards and summer wildflowers from Sigrid, Thranduil’s impossibly elegant signature. He needs them, they’re his lifeline, they are the only thing that has kept him alive so far and damn it, he knows that he is crying and they’re holding down his arm, but please, for the love of god, please-

And a nurse seems to understand, she reaches into the shreds of what had once been his jacket and finds it, shows it to him, tucks it under the pillow where he can’t lose it, and forces a pill between his lips, trying to smile at him as she does so.

He falls unconscious.

He doesn’t hear the debate of the doctors, doesn’t hear the sound of plyers and tweezers and scalpels arriving at his bedside, doesn’t feel the blood and mire being washed gently from his arm. They start soon after, and he does feel that.

He is awake again, and god, he doesn’t want to be.

Everything is black, and agony, and he screams as hands hold him down and yell at him; they’re telling him to be patient, telling him to be still, telling him that _he’s alive and he’s hurt and it is going to be alright and they are doctors and we need you to stop moving, we need to get the shrapnel out, for the love of god man stop moving if you don’t want to bleed to death,_ and-

He passes out again, for a while, and that is probably for the best.

He doesn’t know how long passes.

He wakes feeling strangely numb, and around him are the sounds that no soldier ever wants to hear: the call of nurses, exhausted but strong; the shouts of doctors and surgeons; the slow drip of blood onto the floor; the screaming of the men bedridden in here, men who are falling apart, literally. Worse still are the moans, the low and quiet sounds of the ones who know that they will not make it through the night.

There is a nurse above him, watching him critically.

He’s in a field hospital. He’s been injured. And that means that it is quite possible that he is going to die here, without ever having the chance to see his children again.

He becomes slowly aware of his body again: his mind had given him moments enough reprieve from the pain to assess where he was, but now it was all flooding back, the agony of his arm, the worrying numbness in his leg, the screaming pain that was his foot. What had happened? There was an explosion, wasn’t there? He’d been patrolling the outskirts of the town, just some small place, barely worth a mention on the map but for its strategic use on the intersection of two main roads. He’d been with some of his brothers. Mickey. Keith. Bo.

“My brothers,” he rasps, and his voice does not sound like his own. “I was on patrol, and-”

She smiles at him, and it is a bitter smile.

“It was a mine,” she says, and his heart sinks. “I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t need to explain. The fact that he has survived means that he was far enough away to get only shrapnel, not the force of the blast. He’d been standing at the end of their line. They were gone.

He cries, although he isn’t sure who it is for.

The darkness takes him again.

 

* * *

 

 

HONOURABLE DISCHARGE FROM THE BRITISH ARMED FORCES

AUGUST 2ND, 1945

THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT _Bard Bowman_ HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY AND HONOURABLY DISCHARGED FROM HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE FOLLOWING COMMENDABLE SERVICE IN THE LINE OF HIS DUTY. DISCHARGE IS FOLLOWING INJURY, DETAILS BELOW.

_Shrapnel embedded in right forearm and hand, injury sustained to left thigh, broken left foot; injuries sustained following mine explosion_

SIGNED, _Dr S F Masters_

 

* * *

 

It’s an official discharge, according to the officer that stops by his bed one afternoon, but he doesn’t really listen, and if he’s being honest with himself, he knows that he doesn’t really care anymore. He can’t think about anything but that crippling pain, the burning heat that is his right hand.

They didn’t get all the shrapnel out, a nurse tells him gently, one evening when it seems like he might be awake enough to really process what is going on. But they got most of it, at least. Bard does understand enough to realise the underlying implications of that: his arm might heal, but it would never be the same again. He drifts back into pained sleep wondering how he is going to work once all of this is over, once he has his children back with him. But things hurt too much to really think about the big picture.

The pain medication they have given him makes him feel strange, and he knows that they are having to ration it now so he doesn’t understand how what he is taking can feel so damn _strong,_ leaving him swimming, barely aware of anything but his arm.

By god, it hurts.

The war ends before the transport to take him back to England even arrives, and isn’t that a joke? He made it so close to the end of the war before being injured: it’s typical of his luck. There are no celebrations out here. Perhaps the nurses look happier for a while, but the men around them are still dying, still screaming, still bleeding all over the floor. His arm feels different now, he thinks, a strange kind of pain that he can’t quite place. He can’t see the skin under the bandages they’ve wrapped it in, but he’s getting shooting pains in his fingers. He worries about them, when he isn’t too tired to care, all the way back to England.

He’s taken to a military hospital in York, and worse news comes then.

 

* * *

 

POST OFFICE TELEGRAM

JANUARY 3RD, 1942

THE WAR OFFICE REGRETS TO INFORM YOU OF THE DESTRUCTION OF YOUR PROPERTY [138 CANAL SIDE, MANCHESTER] IN AN AIR RAID ATTACK ON THE CITY. THE WAR OFFICE IS IN THE PROCESS OF ORGANISING ALTERNATIVE ACCOMODATION FOR YOU WHEN YOU RETURN FROM THE FRONT. WE ALL MUST REMAIN STRONG AND UNITED IN THIS GRAVE TIME. GOD SAVE THE KING.

 

* * *

 

He reads it with a strange sort of ambivalence. His house, _their_ house, small and ramshackle as it had been, is gone: it was destroyed years ago, not long after he had left for war, and the telegram has just been waiting for his return. Do his children know?

There is a bitter, quiet part of himself that wonders if they held this news back from him intentionally, but he isn’t sure if anyone had had the time to even consider the feelings of one individual soldier.

His father’s desk, the one piece of furniture that he had been able to pass down to his son, is probably ashes. His mother’s cookbook, the cheap one that was twice as thick as it had been to start, padded out with amendments and additional recipes that she had stuck in over the years. Sometimes he had flicked through it, when he missed her, smiling at her acerbic asides about the cost of flour or the idiocy of the measurements on a recipe for shortbread. He doubted he’d ever see it again. The trunk of his wife’s dresses, the ones that he hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to sell: they’ll all be gone, too. The pictures his children had made, their school reports, the toys that they hadn’t taken with them. Everything that they had ever owned.

It’s all gone.

He doesn’t weep, he just folds the telegram up awkwardly, with one hand, and slides it into the tin that he still keeps in his pocket, having to wrestle with it for a moment before it will even pop open. He spares a glance, when he does, at the photographs and letters inside, and it strikes him that this is all that he owns now, in the entire world.

He still can’t move his arm properly, nor his hand. By the time he gets to York and they took the bandages off, the wounds were stinking with pus and infection. It leaves him feverous, delirious. They drain the wounds and bandage them again, but there are too many wounded soldiers and not enough nurses, even fewer doctors left: they give him his pills each day and he sleeps through the worst of the pain.

The pills leave him woozy though, and stop him thinking straight. Dreams shift into reality, and sometimes he lies there watching men he knows are dead cry in the corner. He always falls asleep before those apparitions disappear, leaving the sound of sobbing echoing through his mind.

He’s scared he might have to lose his arm.

He’s seen far worse happen in the hospital on the front.

No letters come for him: he isn’t even sure if his family have learnt what has happened to him, heard where he is, and he doesn’t know how to get in touch with them: he can barely hold a spoon, let alone a pen, and he feels too guilty to ask one of the nurses for help. But soon enough the infection gets worse, and he forgets everything but the pain of it.

His skin feels like it is on fire.

He drifts in and out of consciousness: it might have been for days, but it could also have been for years, as far as Bard is concerned. His dreams are vivid, and full of a terror that leaves him sweating, and cold. In his dreams his world is burning, there is fire all around him, and he cannot get out: Bain’s face dances in front of his, looking terrified, and Sigrid drowns in water that she cannot swim in. He can’t find Tilda. She’s never there.

The fire burns his skin, and everything crashes around him; a dragon with Churchill’s face laughs at him. He sees smoke creeping after him along the canals back home, chasing him, calling for him, searching him out. He’s still wearing his stinking uniform, and wakes almost retching and the stench of his own body, at the dried blood and shit and filth that has become a part of his daily existence.

When they give him his medication each evening the dreams ease, at least of a few hours. He imagines dappled sunlight in his children’s hair, tart fruit and laughter, the slow sound of Thranduil’s voice, only half remembered, reading the letters that Bard sends him aloud. Then the other dreams come back, and he can see only the faces of the men he has left behind on the front, the men who called him brother and who will never come home, and blood.

He cries in the night, sometimes for hours, but that’s okay – most people in this ward do, anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

But slowly, somehow, he starts to feel better. The nurses cluck and tell him that he has the constitution of an ox, but he knows that isn’t why. He just can’t let himself die here, not without seeing his children: he can’t break his promise to Sigrid, can’t go without kissing Tilda’s forehead one last time, can’t bear to leave Bain to grow up alone, not quite yet. They change his bandages again, and it still stinks, but it is more him and less infection now.

The doctors are happy. The wounds are finally closing up, leaving long ridges of vivid red scar tissue in their wake.

Bard watches the entire thing with a strange sort of indifference.

It hurts.

He’s moved to a recuperation facility once they beat the infection, but in his heart he knows that it is just another bed that he cannot move out of. It’s in an old country manor, and he wonders what happened to the lord that must once have lived here, before the war. Now, metal-framed beds line every dining hall and library, and all that is left of the family that came before are the faded marks on the wall where great pictures must once have hung. He asks for a bath, this time, and the nurse says that she will see what she can do, but the first week passes and she has clearly forgotten. He doesn’t blame her – she has the entire of the library to staff alone, just her, and there are patients in far worse condition than he.

The man in the bed next to him tries to strike up conversation occasionally: the skin of his face has been stripped away in fire, and he stares at Bard with one pale, green eye through a mass of bandages. It reminds him of his dreams, and he says little in response.

He still can’t use his hand to write a letter, still can’t do anything with it, and he’s been lying for so long that he isn’t sure if he can even walk. His legs feel like they’ve wasted away; he probes the second injury with his one good hand, the great slice in his right leg, only to find that it has healed over, too. He’s barely thought of it, focused too much on his arm.

Bard is back in England, and it has been two years since he has seen his children, and even now that he is here he cannot find a way to them.

He feels weak; he spends much of the day sleeping, filled with regret.

Everything hurts, but the worse pain is when he wonders if he will ever see them again, his brave girls and his beautiful boy, and if they will even recognise him when they do.

Are they even looking for him?

Do they think him dead?

Have they given up hope that he will return for them?

The war is over: it has been well over three months since he first stepped on that mine, and the parades celebrating their victory (only it still doesn’t feel like a victory to Bard, not in the real sense of it) have come and gone. No doubt his children waved the union flag and cheered the boys coming back home, not realising that their father was already here, oozing pus and half dead.

Maybe he is dead already, and this is just some long and painful purgatory.

Is he going to hell? Him and half the world, probably. War is over. They’ve buried so many man, so many women, so many children. There might have been a few bad men somewhere in that pile, but most of them, he thinks, must have been just like him. There because someone put a gun in their hands and told them they had to. _War is over, war is over, victory is ours._

But the ghosts remain.

So do the dreams.

 

* * *

 

 

Then one day he wakes up and he is sure that it has finally happened, sure that the madness that threatened to take over him every day on the front has finally eased its slippery way through his defences, because that’s Sigrid’s voice, isn’t it?

She’s arguing with someone – no, he must be insane – she sounds so close though, sounds so near, and she’s using that tone of voice that her mother used to scold with when she would tolerate no argument. She sounds so fierce, and perhaps this isn’t hell after all, perhaps he was simply waiting to go in the other direction – so many people have died after all, it is only to be expected that there is a queue, and this can’t actually be Sigrid, not here, not in this place. She’s his girl, his baby, his first, his fierce little beauty, and she’s a long way from here.

She’s somewhere green, and happy, and warm. With Thranduil, and his son. Living a better life than Bard could ever have hoped to provide them with.

“Da!”

It shakes him from his stupor, and he opens his eyes now, because that is _definitely_ Tilda, close by, and he tries to pull himself into sitting up but forgets, as he so often does, that he can barely use one arm, and half collapses back onto the bed with a bellow of pain, rolling onto one side, but that means that he is looking out across the makeshift ward and he can _see_ her, his youngest, and she’s laughing and running through the line of cots. For a moment he feels guilty at the noise that they are making, the soldiers they are disturbing, but then he sees that though some of them are weeping, there are others that are smiling, and more that manage to do both.

Her hair is longer, far longer than it used to be, in a long braid that flies out behind her. There is Bain too, his brave boy, and his son is already crying at the sight of time. Sigrid isn’t far behind, taller than she was before and running to. Behind them is a blonde boy, looking nervous and familiar, and then there is a red-haired girl, standing back a little, behind Thranduil, who’s holding her hand and staring at him.

There is a brief moment, when the world seems to still, and the two simply watch each other. Thranduil isn’t smiling, but there is a relief in his expression that has no name or explanation.

Bard doesn’t have any time to dwell on that, though, because soon after he has his one good arm full of his little ones, and all three of them are crying now, and Tilda is flailing at his shoulders and shouting at him for getting injured; Bain has buried his face in Bard’s neck and seems unwilling to let go; Sigrid is peppering his shorn scalp with kisses. Right now he doesn’t give a damn about anything else in the world, just his beautiful children, laughing and crying together, and his arm is agony from when he tried to lift himself up but he can barely bring himself to notice.

They’re _here._ They’ve _found_ him.

And they stay for quite some time. They make him tell them what happened, all that they don’t know, but he feels that it must have been a sorry tale, for he can remember so little of it, really. He doesn’t tell them about the pain, or the dreams, or the infection, but he does tell them that the pills have made him very woozy, and that he can’t write, which is why he hasn’t been in touch. Sigrid eyes his bandages – more of a dirty grey again now than white – with some concern, but they seem to buy his story that not all that much damage has been done.

He makes the mistake of looking across at Thranduil at one point though, who is stood by the end of the bed with the other two children, not quite a part of it all but not separate, either. The man certainly _doesn’t_ believe his story.

But then, Bard supposes that it doesn’t really matter. He trusts Thranduil to spare the children the worst of it, just as he has been doing the last few years.

“We’ll see you very soon,” Sigrid promises him when the nurse finally shoos them away, and perhaps it is testament to the glow that has suffused Bard’s mind that he doesn’t stop to question that any further.

“Very, very soon!” Tilda chips in, her voice bright. Bain doesn’t say anything, but his eyes are starting to well up again, and so Bard just kisses the back of his hand and tries to wink at him, the way he used to when Bain was a little one and got nervous about doing something. Bain tries to smile in response, so he supposes that it must have worked, at least a little.

Thranduil nods at him, when they go, and it is only afterwards that Bard realises that he forgot to thank the man, for bringing Bard’s kids all the way here. He curses himself a little for that, but convinces himself that he’ll do it next time, that it won’t really matter that he didn’t remember.

He drifts back into sleep, for a little while, until he is woken by the nurses.

 

* * *

 

 

OLD LEES MILITARY HOSPITAL, YORKSHIRE

DISCHARGE PAPERS

9TH NOVEMBER, 1945

PATIENT: _Bard Bowman_

ADMITTED: _1 st October 1945_

INJURIES: _broken foot (set and healing on admission), wound to left thigh (stitched and healing on admission), shrapnel wounds in right arm, recovering from infection to injury_

SIGNED: _Dr J. P. Jackson_

 

* * *

 

 

Arrangements have apparently been made, though Bard wasn’t privy to them: he suspects, however, that even if a nurse had come to tell him at some point in the last few days that he was to be moved, he wouldn’t have really registered what was happening anyway. The visit from his children has forcibly shaken the life back into him, have made him open his eyes again properly.

He has to get well, doesn’t he? Not for himself, but for them.

He’s too golden after his last visit to bother asking them where he is being taken, but he does make sure to ask a nurse that they send a copy of his discharge papers and his forwarding location to his children. He tells the nurse the address in a voice that sounds almost like his own, enunciating each syllable clearly. He doesn’t need to check to make sure that he is right: that address has been fixed in his mind ever since his children first arrived there. 

They lift him from his bed onto a stretcher, and he shudders a little at the colour of the sheets left behind, at the wrecked state of the remnants of his uniform. He supposes that officers probably get a better treatment than the rest of them: no doubt when Thranduil had returned from war, he had been cared for differently. He wonders, as they carry him out of the ward, what the man must have thought at the state of them.

He waves at the man in the bed next to him as he passes, the bandages still covering the wreckage of his burnt face, and resolves himself to being kinder in the future. But it is hard, at times when you have sunk to the lowest that you have ever been, to think of others.

It is dark outside now, and they load him quietly into a small country ambulance. It isn’t the great truck that he was moved here in, packed with soldiers that were deposited at various military hospitals. Tonight it is just him, and the two men driving and carrying, and it is peaceful. When was the last time he sat in the dark night and didn’t have to listen to the distant sound of screaming? He isn’t sure if he can remember, anymore.

Bard watches through the window, barely feeling the bumps in the road as they shake the bed of the ambulance. There is a haze of cloud, so he cannot see any stars, but the moon is bright and nearly full, the light of it burning through the overcast. The trees that line the road look almost silvery in that light, the bark of the bare branches rendered in a precious metal in the still of the night. It is quiet, and he drifts to sleep.

Somewhere, in the distance, a barn owl hoots.

The drivers share a cigarette, and talk quietly among themselves. They have transported many soldiers today, and this is their last journey.

Bard wakes some hours later, to find that they are driving through a village. It is a small place, and it mustn’t yet be too late in the night because there is a faint glow of light behind some of the windows. They’re still hanging up the blackout curtains, even though the war has been over for nearly two months now. He smiles, to himself, and it is a little bitter. Perhaps they don’t trust in the good news. He can relate to that. Or perhaps they don’t want to believe it: perhaps they have a son who hasn’t come home, and the longer they can pretend like the war is still going on, the longer they can remain hopeful that he will return to them.

He looks away.

There is blood from the field still under his nails, and he wonders if any of it could belong the sons of this small village. Hopefully at the next hospital he’ll finally be able to have a bath – and he doesn’t resent it, not really, he knows that there are too many soldiers and not enough facilities, but as long as the filth of the war is still on him he can’t help but feel like it still isn’t over, like it hasn’t really gone away, like it is still out there, looming and undefeatable, no longer a war of purpose or sides, just indeterminate and never ending violence against all men, ready to swallow him whole again.

The shadows of his dreams lurch out of the corners of the ambulance towards him.

He closes his eyes, and wishes that he still found comfort in prayer.

Bard has fallen half-asleep again when the ambulance finally stops, but the cool, winter air rouses him as the drivers open the door. He blinks, and tries to roll his shoulders to ease an ache, only to exacerbate the pain in his arm instead. He grits his teeth against it, refusing to scream. That is a strength that he did not have a week ago, he knows. He doubted that he had it a day ago. It comes from his children, from the re-found desire that they rekindled inside him. He has to be strong, for them. He has to be their father, again.

There are night blooming flowers somewhere close, he thinks, or perhaps just ones whose scent has lingered. It is late in the year for flowers though – it is strange that something should grow when the tendrils of frost are already threatening to curb the last of autumn’s growth. He shrugs off the thought, though – it isn’t really important, anyway.

He can’t see much of the house from the stretcher – most of the lights are off. But it is smaller than the one he came from, the stone work less ornate, and just as he is trying to work out where he might be the front door swings open, the light from the hallway pooling on the drive, golden around them. He raises his one good arm to block the light from his eyes, appearing too suddenly, too brightly.

The voice that greets them is familiar, though it takes him a moment to place it.

He is carried up the steps, and he is too tired to ask Thranduil why he is here, or what is going on, but Thranduil seems to understand, and just shakes his head: later.

They carry him through to a room, somewhere on the ground floor. The house is quiet, and still, and cool, but there is a fire burning in this room, one that has been recently stoked, and he finds himself almost shuddering in the warmth of it. He protests when they try to lift him on to the bed.

“Uniform,” he tells Thranduil, his voice hoarse now. “I’m filthy, I’ll ruin the sheets.”

Thranduil just shrugs, as if this is of no concern to him, and gestures for the drivers to continue. He commands the room, and they listen to him, not to Bard, and it is enough to make him start crying, silently, though he isn’t sure why he is.

Thranduil sends the drivers away, leading them out of the room and back to the ambulance, and Bard lies on his back in the bed, far softer than any of the ones that he has ever slept in, and watches the firelight play across the ceiling. Soon after Thranduil returns, but he still does not say anything: he just sits by the bed, close enough that Bard can see him but not so close that they might have to talk, and watches the fire. Bard watches him, the soft shine of his hair in the dim light, the hard line of his profile, the frown that rests across his brow.

It is the last thing he remembers seeing before he drifts, slowly, to a troubled sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the second chapter, as promised. I'd like to take a moment to thank the mods for organising this bang, which has been a great experience, and my artists for taking a risk with me. There are a couple of links that will have to be added later, but for now here are the links to the wonderful art done by the very talented artists who signed up to work with this project. Who's a lucky author? And you should definitely take a moment to look through their blogs whilst you're at it. 
> 
>  
> 
> [by lily-winterwood](http://evil-bones-mccoy.tumblr.com/post/119108787389/but-not-even-they-could-keep-him-here-at-home), [and the second one by this artist!](http://evil-bones-mccoy.tumblr.com/post/119122828934/he-re-reads-the-fragments-of-letters-that-he-has)  
> [by primea](http://double-espresso-at-midnight.tumblr.com/post/119100570648/art-for-the-wounding-and-healing-of-man-by)  
> [by queenstardust](http://queenstardust.tumblr.com/post/119095211106/since-i-missed-to-enter-the-barduil-big-bang-i)  
> [by shamingcows](http://shamingcows.tumblr.com/post/120335233303/the-wounding-and-healing-of-man-by-northerntrash)  
> [by srapsodia](http://srapsodia.tumblr.com/post/119344466229)  
> and check out sansael's amazing [video!](http://sansael.tumblr.com/post/120694157174/northerntrash-this-is-for-you-for-me-the-only)  
> My edits for this fic can be found [here](http://northerntrash.tumblr.com/tagged/whm-mine); the playlist is [here](http://8tracks.com/northerntrash/the-wounding-and-healing-of-man). And you can always come chat to me on [tumblr](http://northerntrash.tumblr.com/) if you want. :)

He wakes suddenly when there is a loud noise somewhere close by, struggling against the heavy covers, trying to sit up for a moment on instinct before remembering that he can only use one arm: he pulls himself slowly, painfully upright, listening carefully. Someone has come in, whilst he was sleeping, and has cleared the fire, relaying and lighting it. so the room is warm again, so alien to all that he has known in the last few years.

There is a knock at the door, but before he can work out whether he is supposed to call out or not it is pushed open, revealing the faces of all three of his children.

“Da!” Bain calls out, leaping across the room on long, gangly legs.

Sigrid smiles at him. “Thranduil told us that you wouldn’t be arriving until tomorrow,” she admits, “to stop us from staying up all night waiting for you, I think.”

He reaches for her, and she leans closer, letting him kiss her cheek.

“Good,” Bard said, only then noticing that Tilda is very carefully carrying a tray. He feels his heart sink in his chest as they rest it across his knees and sit around the bed, chattering away about all the things they have to show him, and all the places in their new life that they want to take him to see. There is a panic building in his chest as he looks down at the bowl of oatmeal, drizzled with honey. It’s in a blue-patterned china bowl, far better than anything they have ever owned, and there is a spoon by its side.

He swallows, but they are watching him expectantly, and he picks up the spoon awkwardly with his left arm. It’s strong enough to push himself up with, and so he thinks of it as his good arm, but whenever he tries to do anything with it starts to shake, against his will.

He tries to eat, because they've tried and they’re smiling and they are so _happy_ to see him here, but he’s ashamed. He can barely manage, the oatmeal falling from the spoon across the tray.

He drops his spoon several times, against his will, but perseveres, because they are watching.

Shell shock, they call it, but all Bard knows is that it feels like hell: as if it wasn’t bad enough that he couldn’t use one arm, his other had become virtually redundant thanks to his own mind.

He can’t look up at them; he feels tears of frustration building in the corners of his eyes. The oatmeal tastes of ashes in his mouth.

The kids are staring at him, growing visibly more upset the longer that they watch.

Bard wants to disappear.

What use do they have for a father that can’t even feed himself?

But before he has a chance to work out what is best to do, Thranduil marches into the room, an elegant cane in one hand keeping him propped up today. It’s made of some dark, polished wood, and there are silver vines wound around the top, leading up to a curved handle. It looks strong; far stronger than Bard is feeling him right now.

“Off you go,” he tells the three of them, the corner of his mouth curving up slightly in as close to a smile as he seems able to manage. “Your father and I need to talk. Tauriel and Legolas are in the library, waiting for you. I believe that they would like to try building more of the treehouse this morning.”

Bard wants to ask about this treehouse, but finds that he doesn’t even have the energy to do so. He kisses Tilda’s head, smiles at Bain and Sigrid, and watches them go; Thranduil takes the tray off him, not commenting on the mess, and leaves it on the side table. He sits down, apparently waiting for something, and soon enough and older woman knocks and enters, dragging in a large, tin bath.

She returns several times as the pair of them sit in silence, slowly filling it with great copper kettles that must have been heating for hours down in the kitchen. It is close enough to the fire to remain warm, and he tries to move his legs.

They barely listen to him.

Thranduil stands, once she is finally done.

“My housekeeper,” he tells Bard, his voice low and quiet. “Mrs Price.”

She checks the bathwater, and then throws another log on the fire. Bard watches this feeling strangely distant from the entire affair, not really reacting as Thranduil comes to the bed. He leaves his cane on the floor, and throws the covers back, pulling Bard’s legs around, and sitting beside him, slowly turning him, before he loops Bard’s good arm around his shoulders.

When Thranduil stands, he takes most of Bard’s own weight, half-carrying him across the room. It's a slow move, Thranduil staggering a little at one point, but Bard can't quite find the part of himself that would resent this treatment, would resent people acting this way around him. The sheets are ruined, as Bard knew that they would be, and he tries to apologise to both of them, but the housekeeper just clucks her tongue at him and begins stripping them off. She leaves them, shutting the door behind her with her arms full of laundry, just as Thranduil eases him down into a chair.

He doesn’t ask Bard if he needs help, and Bard doesn’t protest the treatment. Even when Thranduil begins stripping him of the remnants of his uniform, leaving him bare and shivering, he can hardly bring himself to feel anything, as if this is no longer his body, and if none of this has anything to do with him.

Thranduil pauses at every half-healed laceration, tuts at every rat and flea bite, sighs quietly at every scar, though he says nothing. There is something comforting about his lack of condolences, that he doesn’t feel the need to tell Bard how brave he must have been, how proud the country is of him, or any of the many pointless niceties that have been thrown his way, kind words that mean nothing.

_This,_ this means something.

Thranduil helps him to his feet again, one still a little strange and swollen looking from the break, and half-lifts him into the bath.

The water is so warm, and for a moment Bard wants to sink beneath it, and never surface again.

But then Thranduil is talking, his voice still quiet, as he takes off his jacket and rolls up his shirt sleeves, only to kneel beside the bathtub.

“When I first came back from war, I could barely move from the pain of my leg.”

There is a tray beside the bath that Bard hadn’t noticed until then, and Thranduil lifts a piece of flannel from it. He takes Bard’s good arm from the water, and begins cleaning it, with thorough, firm strokes.

The soap smells of lavender.

Bard closes his eyes.

“I couldn’t even bring myself to talk.” Thranduil’s voice is calm, quiet, as if he isn’t talking about him, but some distant acquaintance, whose story he has happened to overhear at a party, and is now repeating to another friend. “My son was a baby, and they brought him in to see me, and I couldn’t feel anything.”

Bard looks at his injured arm, still wrapped in dirty bandages. It has been weeks since he has seen the skin beneath it, since he had first been set to the second hospital.

“Why are you helping me?”

Thranduil looks at him.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Bard doesn’t know how to reply to that. He’s a damned old soldier, who has killed men that didn’t deserve to die, with an arm that doesn’t work and three children that he doesn’t know how to provide for. He isn’t from a world that would normally help men like him.

“I have enough to go around,” Thranduil says, and he scrubs Bard’s nails, and his voice is even quieter now. “You’re a good man, and you love your children, and I have enough to tend to an injured old solider, one just like I have been.”

They say nothing more, for very long time. Thranduil is as thorough as any nurse, and soon enough it is the water that is black with mire, and Bard who is clean. The dirt is scrubbed from his nails, the filth from what is left of his hair. He closes his eyes, and wonders that he isn’t embarrassed by this treatment, by some stranger caring for him as if he were a babe. But this is no longer his body, he feels now. This is the body of a stranger, a stranger who has killed and served the time he has owed his King and country. This is not the body of Bard, father and canal man. No, and so how could he feel embarrassed about this whole thing?

Still, Thranduil lets him deal with certain parts of himself alone, and when he finally lifts Bard from the tub the fire has burnt low, and the morning has reached the afternoon, and he is finally clean.

He is wrapped in towels, large and thick, and settled back down into the chair, as Thranduil sets about drying his skin, rubbing it down until it is pink; Bard’s host is wincing now whenever he shifts, as if kneeling for so long as exacerbated the old injury, but he brushes off Bard’s concern, and refuses to stop.

The housekeeper returns, with aid this time: several men help her empty and carry out the tub, the task much quicker done in reverse. She brings a basin of hot water next, and Thranduil soaks Bard’s bandaged arm, until he can peel off the caked-on fabric.

It feels strange, but the sight isn’t as bad as Bard had feared. He can still barely move it for the pain, and his fingers feel oddly numb: it is a ruin of scar tissue and healing lacerations, a twisting mess of destruction, a badge that he will wear for the rest of his life. He spares a moment to wonder what Thranduil’s own leg looks like, if it is a similar landscape of war.

But it is clean, at least, and relatively whole. Thranduil seems to approve, but leaves it to soak for a little while. There is a strange smell about the water, something sharp, but he trusts that Thranduil isn’t trying to hurt him. Besides, what worse could be done to this arm?

“How did you find me?” he tries, at last, because that is at least a question that Thranduil should be able to answer.

“Sigrid,” is the reply, and it comes with the curve of the mouth that is almost a smile. “She never gave up on you, you know. She kept calling around all the hospitals around your base, every military hospital in the north in the end, looking for you.”

Bard nodded.

“You’d lost your dog tags, in the accident, apparently. They were only able to identify you by the letters that you were carrying. The nurse Sigrid eventually spoke to said that you had put up quite a fight, making sure that you were not parted from them.”

Bard laughed, as Thranduil begin to re-bandage his arm.

“The only envelope I was carrying,” he said, feeling suddenly very tired, “was one written by you, I think.”

It was Thranduil’s letter that had identified him. He had been too incoherent to ever give his name; he had never even thought about the fact that they had known his regiment, known where to send him. He owed his strange host even more, and he had not even realised it.

Thranduil lead him back to the bed, which the housekeeper had remade. The sheets were clean, and fresh, and he smelt of lavender soap.

“Sleep,” Thranduil told him, as he eased Bard down. “Sleep.”

And sleep he did, restfully for a while, until the dreams came back to him.

 

* * *

 

 

The weeks passed, slowly, and Bard began to recover himself a little, at least physically.

A doctor comes, and prescribes him more pills, great chalky things that hurt to swallow. He doesn’t pay for them, and can’t bring himself to ask Thranduil if he did, because he knows the answer.

There still wasn’t much that he could do with his arm, much to his irritation. At first he could barely walk, could hardly even stand without aid, but he has always been one to push himself, and so he does his best to stretch, to move, as much as he is able. There is no form or finesse to his recovery, much to his irritation, but what he does seems to work, at least a least a little, and so he perseveres.

Thranduil found a wheelchair for him, an old metal-framed thing that Bard suspects his host might have used in his own recovery, because the un-cushioned leather seat is a little worn, the body of it well oiled but obviously old.

It means that he can leave his room though, leave his bed at least, and that in itself is enough of a novelty that the high it gives him lasts a few days.

He can’t push it himself, not with only one shaking arm, but his children seem happy to wheel him about, though he can’t help but think of himself as something of a burden to them. He is their father, not their responsibility: parenthood should be the other way around, and there is a resentment that gnaws at him for his self-perceived uselessness, an irritation that he tries not to let out in the form of snapping anger, biting words. His children would understand, he thinks, but he can’t do that to them, not on top of everything else, and so he bottles it up instead, until he feels as if he is about to burst with his anger at the whole situation.

Everything hurts, and the pain doesn’t seem to ease even though he finds it easier each day to move his tired legs again. There is progress, but it isn’t enough when the bite of injuries do not lessen.

His children seem to love having him back, though, and he does love being around them again.

They follow him around like ducklings, he thinks, Sigrid pushing the chair and the other two trailing behind them, laughing and pointing out each thing in the house that they have come to know and love. Legolas and Tauriel follow too, and he gets to know them a little better. Legolas is a bright young thing, funny and perhaps a little older than he should be, but he is strangely distant when it comes to his father: Thranduil comes up often in conversation though he rarely appears in person, and every time he does Legolas seems to shrink back into himself a little, as if he is afraid of saying anything much. Tauriel, Bard learns, is another fostered child that has not been with them long, which explains why Bard has not heard stories about her before. Apparently (according to Sigrid, who has taken it upon herself to be his guide, and who whispers explanations in his ear every few minutes, so he doesn’t feel lost) her father was in the same regiment as Thranduil when he was in the armed forces, and re-enlisted in Bard’s war. He died, and her mother followed soon after from grief: she had no family and no friends close enough to take her in, and so Thranduil had stepped forward.

Thranduil seems to be the kind of man who takes in strays, Bard thinks, a little bitterly. Lost, lonely things in need of shelter.

He feels like a starving dog that their host has taken pity on, and resentfully reminds himself that a dog should never bite the hand that feeds. Thranduil is a cold man, a distant man, but not really a bad one, for all of it. He should hate him, he still wants to hate him, but Bard still can’t find a well of dark inside himself deep enough to draw that hatred from, despite himself.

He keeps thinking of it as ‘his war’, he realises with a start one afternoon when he is brooding about such things, sat on the patio outside the house in his wheelchair, a blanket around his knees as if he is some sort of invalid (which he is, he has to keep reminding himself). ‘His war’, as if he holds all the blame for it himself, as if he was the only one that fought and lost out there. He wonders if it is a little selfish of him, but he can’t bring himself to think of it in any other way, not yet.

The house itself isn’t really as grand as Bard had once supposed.

Oh, it is far bigger than anything he has ever lived in, of course, but hardly the stuff reserved for the greatest of Lords in the country. It is set back in wide gardens, sprawling land around them, but the house itself is almost modest, in terms of size and staff. There are kitchens and servants quarters below, which he has not been to yet (despite the fact that he feels as if he might belong better down there, the stairs are beyond his ability, and the wheelchair far too awkward to make it down the narrow, twisting steps). The ground floor boasts a dining room, with a wide oak table to sit at least twelve, a table for entertaining: when Bard and his wife’s friends used to come over, they would sprawl around his small living room, no room in their house for a table that size. He tries to imagine them in Thranduil’s house, and can’t quite picture it.

There is a parlour that he avoids, the furniture too smart and beautiful for the likes of him, and a sitting room too, which at least looks a little more comfortable. There is a playroom at the back, a long room with windows that overlook twisting old cherry trees that are stark this time of year. The room is full of toys that Legolas has accumulated over the years, and he is happy to share, the children spending long hours playing with toy airplanes, and trains. He spends a lot of time in there, watching his children read or play on the days when the weather is too inclement to be outdoors. His children don’t need the ghost of his father looming over them, but he is loathe to sit in another room: he can’t quite stand the thought of being apart from them, even if they are still in the same house. When he does he finds himself nervous, wondering what might be happening to them in his absence.

War is over, but he has never been as scared for his children as he is now. They are together but not in a place he knows, and he worries irrationally that someone might come and take them away whilst he is not looking.

There is the room that has been turned into his, too, in a quiet corner of the ground floor. Though there is a bed in it now he suspects that it wasn’t always there, and wonders if Thranduil convalesced in the same place.

A wide sprawling hall, and Thranduil’s library and study (another room into which he does not step, despite the fact that Sigrid often wanders in there searching for a new book to read) make up the rest of the ground floor. The whole place is spacious and beautiful and feeds the fires of his temper, the wooden panelling old and expensive, the leather of the armchairs fine and dark with well-tended age, the ornaments relics of generations past. The only thing Bard ever had from his father was his old desk, and even that has been destroyed.

There is his pocket watch too, he supposes, although that belongs to Sigrid now.

He doesn’t tell the children that their home is gone: he doesn’t have the words for it.

Above is another floor, then a smaller one and then the attic, but they are all beyond Bard’s reach until he relearns the use of his legs fully. His children describe it to him though, trying to get him used to the place. There are four large bedrooms above, indoor bathrooms too (and all they had ever had growing up was an outhouse, drafts blowing in in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter). One of those rooms is Thranduil’s, another belongs to Legolas. Another is spare, and a third was given to Bain, when he arrived. The next floor has just two bedrooms, a little smaller, in which the girls sleep: one for each of them, though Sigrid admits that that hadn't been long before Tilda had crept into hers. All three girls sleep in one room, now: Thranduil had had a bed moved into Sigrid’s for Tilda, but neither of them had adjusted to great double beds after a childhood of sharing ones much more narrow, and the second had stood empty until Tauriel had arrived. She had been given the Tilda's old, now empty bedroom, but after hearing her crying Sigrid had invited her into theirs, and now all three girls slept in one room, together.

His children have hearts the size of stars, he thinks, and he can’t help but be proud of them.

It is quiet in the house, too. There is a housekeeper and a cook, a couple of gardeners who rarely venture inside, and a pair of younger girls who do the sweeping and lay the fires. It is enough to keep the house ticking over without it being too much of an extravagance – though such a thing would be far and above the means of anyone that Bard has ever known.

The servants avoid him mostly, and he wishes that wasn’t the case. It would be nice to talk, even a little, to people closer to him.

The month drags on, and he says and does very little. By the time Christmas rolls around he is walking again, although he can only manage about the length of the house before the ache of his legs becomes too much and he is forced to sit down, rubbing at the scar on his thigh through the fabric of the clothes that Thranduil has provided for him.

Christmas is a strange affair: they are included as if they were family, but he supposes that the children have had several Christmases here, by now. He grudgingly asks Thranduil to write to the bank on his behalf, neither of his arms good enough yet to manage a pen – it is one of the few conversations he has with Thranduil in those first few weeks, the two doing their best, it seems, to avoid each other – and when the small amount he requests comes through he asks one of the maids to pick up presents for the children in the village with it. All of the children, too – they are only small things, all that he can afford. New pencils for Sigrid, toy soldiers for Tilda, and he re-gifts his binoculars to Bain, the army-issued pair that he had barely had a cause to use, one of the few things that made it from the trenches to here with him. For Legolas he orders a wooden RAF plane, the kind that comes in parts that you can build and paint yourself, and he is stuck for a while on Tauriel, before the main kindly suggests a slinky, apparently a popular toy this year that Bard hasn’t ever heard of.  

He agonises for an age over what to get for Thranduil, barely knowing the man but feeling too uncomfortable not to get him anything, and in the end he asks Sigrid, who confesses that Thranduil has a secret weakness for sweets, and has been rather grumpy since rations were stretched even further and they became hard to find. Bard talks to the cook, feeling uncomfortable as he does so, and buys the small number of ingredients she needs to make the master of the house a batch of fudge on Bard’s behalf. The sugar costs as much as the presents for his children, and he feels a burning irritation at that, but knows that he must do something. He hands over the last of the money the bank sent him, balking at the extravagance of it all.

He has little money in his bank account now: he doesn’t need to read the letter from the bank to know that, but they are here, after all, purely out of Thranduil’s notion of charity. He must be repaid, in some small way.

Christmas is gentle enough, though. There is a meal, and he hardly eats any of it, the food too rich for him still, but the cook sends up a bowl of the broth that he has been eating since he arrived when she hears, and he appreciates that. For the first time he manages to eat without spilling his food, the shake in his good hand slowly coming back under his control: he has to focus, and everyone else is long done eating by the time he is through, though they sit around the table and wait without comment. The girls are wearing paper crowns, and he startles a little at the sound of the crackers they pull snapping, but it doesn’t make him wince the way it might have done even a few weeks before. They retire to the sitting room afterwards, forgoing the more formal parlour: there is a small spruce tree set up in here, decorated with paper chains that the children have made, and painted pine cones. Bard has never had a Christmas tree before, and he finds that he quite likes the sight of it. There are some delicate glass decorations hung in it too, a contrast to the gaudy things the children have made together, but they catch the warm light of the candles lit around the hearth and don’t irritate him with their elegance today.

Thranduil had bought new books and toys for all the children, but Bard feels a small and irrational stab of pride when Tauriel spends hours with her slinky over her other gifts. He knows it is petty, and Thranduil seems not to mind in the slightest, but it is a small victory after what feels to him like months of a long, continuous defeat.

The children have three or four presents each, Legolas no more from his father than the other children, no favouritism shown, and it eases his spite a little.

_They have been cared for,_ he reminds himself, and almost smiles as he passes Thranduil the package of fudge, despite himself. _They have been loved, in your absence_.

The children have made things for him and Thranduil too, all five of them. There are cards and drawings and little animals made out of folded paper, and he stands each of them along the mantelpiece in his room before he goes to bed that night, wondering at how little anger he feels that evening compared to others.

Thranduil doesn’t get him anything, but Bard wasn’t expecting him too. He isn’t a child, after all, and Thranduil letting him stay here is more than many others would give.

The man does seem to look a little sad that evening though, when they part ways, the children barging ahead on the stairs, laughing and happy and tired from a joyful day. He rests a fleeting hand on Bard’s shoulder, as Bard turns to go back to his own room, Thranduil’s gaze blank but something flickering about his eyes that makes Bard think, for a moment, that he is about to say something.

He doesn’t, and they each retire without saying anything more.

New Year comes next, and he falls asleep by the fire long before the clock chimes the change. He wakes in a dim room the next morning, Sigrid’s blanket thrown over him, his oldest always worrying.

It is better than his last few New Years, he supposes, but for a moment he misses the bitter taste of Mickey’s stinging liquor. He remembers then that they are all dead, those men that he drank the old year in with, and weeps for a while quietly before the smoking embers of the fire, for all that has been lost.

They are still with him though, but not in the way the Church services might tell him. They are still in his dreams, and in them, they are angry.

How dare he live, when they did not?

Those dreams still follow him, and they are quick to take the joy of life away from him. Twisting shapes and broken bodies crawl after him as he runs down the corridors of sleep, and in the dark mornings he barely feels rested at all, lying on his bed and forcing himself to wake properly, not to waste the day in bed as he would like. The dreams haven’t gotten any better, but he supposes that it is something that they haven’t gotten any worse, either.

He muffles his screams against the pillow when he wakes up, too afraid of waking up the rest of the house, and the next morning he can barely use his one good hand for the way it shakes. His legs, back under his control now even if they are weak, tap an endless broken rhythm when he sits, as if tapping along to the sounds of gun fire and explosions that he still thinks he can hear, sometimes, somewhere in the distance.

Shell shock, the nurses in the hospitals had muttered to each other, over and over again, so the words are embedded in his mind now.

Completely natural, so many men had come back with it this time around.

Bard doesn’t know what it is supposed to mean, those words. Shell shock.

They don’t sound right, not to describe the way that it feels as if the war is still with him, not to describe the unshifting fear that this is all some great and beautiful dream. He doesn’t feel _shocked._

He feels tired.

He feels empty.

Most of all, he just does not feel like himself.

 

* * *

 

 

The winter doesn’t keep its hold too long, this year. They have snow here, which Bard rarely saw in Manchester, making it all look like a proper Christmas card outside, even though the holiday has long passed. He sits on the wooden bench on the stone-flagged patio and watches the children throw snowballs at each other, wishing for a while that he was well enough to join in, before reminding himself that he is lucky enough just to be here, watching. He’s reminding himself to do that more often, now. Thankfulness is coming slowly, and some days it is still beaten by his anger, but he is doing his best.

That’s all he really can do, he has come to realise. He has always been a man that makes the best of what he can, and perhaps now he can find that man again, the Bard that he once was: a father, and a hard worker, a man who provided even when it seemed that he could not, a man that loved his children and was wary of strangers. A man who rose with the dawn after a restful night without nightmares, a man who worked on the canal and ate simple food and was happy with his life, for what it was. It wasn’t a perfect man, but it was a good man, and a better man than the solider and killer that the war made him into.

He wonders, sometimes, what Thranduil was like before his war, before his injury, before his loss. The picture that he begins to paint himself strikes a strange dichotomy in his mind with the man he knows now, but it helps, in an odd way. Perhaps he is allowed to change, just a little, as long as the core of who he is remains the same.

January goes by in that fashion, before February begins to slowly warm: it’ll be an early Spring this year, he thinks to himself, and feels the stirring of something in his chest, some frost that he didn’t realise he was carrying begin to slowly thaw.

His children wear knitted clothes that Thranduil bought them, and their cheeks are rosy with good health. He’s still clumsy when it comes to feeding himself, but he’s better than he was, even if he can still barely move the fingers on his right, injured arm.

He thinks more about Thranduil as the Spring arrives, begins to realise that his anger has been a little unfair, a little undeserving, at times. It is hard to remember that when so much seems dark in his own life, when Thranduil has so much, but is that really his fault?

Perhaps it might be time to make some overture of friendship, but he doesn’t know how to begin.

There are days when he tries to go for a walk, through the dead leaves that still line the narrow pathways, dark and decaying now after the winter. There was frost decorating them the first few times he tries, but soon enough that passes too. He rarely gets far, his legs still tiring quickly, but sometimes he manages to get to the end of the long garden path, to the gate, which he props himself up against to rest for a while before he returns, but it is at least a small amount of freedom.

It’s beautiful out here, he is coming to realise. From the gate all he can see are rolling fields and the twisting fingers of bare trees, stark against the grey of the sky. In a distant field are horses, their breath steaming in the air. No wonder his children have found a peace here.

Perhaps, he wonders sometimes, he might be able to as well.

But that, of course, is a stupid thought: he’s not going to be staying here long enough to find any sense of peace.

There are nights when he hears Thranduil’s cane pad around the night, late into the early morning, and he supposes that at least he isn’t the only one who can’t sleep well anymore. He stops taking the pills: they don’t help the pain, and they just make him feel tired throughout the day, when he is with his children.

Besides, when he is tired, the dreams come quicker.

And oh, the dreams.

The fire, and the shadows, and the great beasts that scream his name in the voices of the friends he has lost. Sometimes they come when he is awake, when he is watching the shadows flickering in the fireplace, or the growing dark as the sun sinks lower in the afternoon. Those ones are the worst of all, because for brief moments he can’t remember what is real and what isn’t, and he reaches for weapons he no longer has.

Then one night he is lying awake, his mind sparking with memories that he can’t escape, and he hears the now-familiar sound of Thranduil’s cane, coming first along the upstairs landing, and then down the stairs. He lies in the dark until the sound has faded, and without quite knowing why, rolls over, using his shaking arm to lift himself, slowly and awkwardly. It still hurts to get out of bed, but he knows that the only sleep he will get tonight will be full of memories that he does not want to think of, ember-bright with the dragon of war.

He pads out of his room, still limping a little on his scarred leg, and down the darkened hall. He hesitates for a moment in front of the library door, wondering whether or not he should knock.

It would be polite to, he knows, but it somehow feels wrong, somehow forced, to do so.

There is a light on in there, a thin bar of golden light shining underneath and across the dark wooden floorboards, across his bare feet, scarred and calloused. He rests his head against the door for a moment instead, trying to steel his nerves, before he remembers that he has faced far worse than a library and a quiet, distant host in the last few years – he pushes open the door, and clears his throat.

Thranduil is sat in an armchair in front of the fire, a pipe resting in his hand, already burnt low. He glances up when Bard enters, and for a long moment they watch each other, silently and carefully, until Thranduil nods in the direction of the other chair.

“Why are you still awake?” Bard asks as he sinks awkwardly into it. The fire has been stoked up again, the flames licking at the fresh log recently thrown onto the embers, and for once the sight of the fire doesn’t bring up bad memories for him. Instead he watches Thranduil, really studies him, as the man turns those strangely pale-blue eyes towards him.

“The same reason as you,” Thranduil replies, in a measured tone, collected and careful.

Bard feels a little uncomfortable, concerned that they might be playing some game that he doesn’t quite understand. He doesn’t know how to join in, either, so remains blunt, ignoring Thranduil’s disconcerting ambiguity.

“And what reason is that?”

Thranduil smiles at that, a small flicker of a smile that is gone almost as soon as it appears.

There is a scar, Bard realises suddenly, running along Thranduil’s hairline, curving almost the length of his face, down to his jaw. It is old, and pale now, almost silver against his skin (so much paler than Bard’s has ever been). He has never looked closely enough, before now, to notice it.

 “Dreams,” Thranduil answers him. “Dreams of war.”

Bard swallows, and looks down at his hands, before back up at Thranduil as soon as the other man turns back to the fire.

Thranduil’s hair must once have been the same ash blonde as Legolas’, only it is even lighter now, threaded through with silver-white – but here, in the firelight, it looks almost gold. He’s wearing a velvet dressing gown, so elegant that Bard’s familiar resentment rears its head for a moment. But before the anger follows, Thranduil glances back at him, his gaze tired – perhaps as tired as Bard himself was feeling – and in the face of such a relatable exhaustion Bard backs down, for the first time finds himself relaxing in the presence of his host, leaning back in his chair with a sigh that is only pained because of the ache in his arm, nothing more.

“Will they ever go away?” he asks, and Thranduil looks at him for the longest time, until Bard begins to shift, wondering what that look means. When he does Thranduil looks away, and shrugs, something elegant even in that motion.

“I don’t know.”

Bard nods, and knows that another person might have lied, and told him that that they would, that the dreams would pass, that he definitely would fully recover. But there was no guarantee that that would ever happen, and there is a comfort in that truth, in the lack of dishonesty in Thranduil’s reply.

Bard finds himself smiling a little in reply.

He might not ever get better, he realises, he finally accepts.

Thranduil still has dreams, still walks with a cane, still stays up in these dark and lonely nights, alone in the dark. But despite that, there is a confidence about him, a sense of calm.

And perhaps it, all this, is okay.

They watch each other for a moment longer, and then Thranduil nods again, as if seeing something in Bard’s gaze that he was waiting for. He pushes himself to his feet with his cane, and walks slowly over to a side table, pouring two glasses from a decanter of red wine. He must have called for it before Bard arrived, he thinks, but that doesn’t explain why there are two glasses there, delicate crystal that feels strange in his hand when Thranduil brings one over to him. He can only carry one at a time, the cane in hand, so Thranduil has to go back for his own, but Bard doesn’t offer to help. There is nothing worse, he has learnt, than someone offering a healing man aid – it only builds up the resentment, the frustration.

They are not helpless, they are not invalids.

They are a little scarred, and hurting still. But though they are bruised, even a little broken in places, that doesn’t mean they are worthless.

Far from it, really: everything he has ever used has been second-hand, hand-me-down, scuffed around the edges or patched up. It never made them any less useful.

_They’re just cracked,_ his mother had told him once, when he had asked why all of their plates were old, when he was young enough not to know any better. _And, well, a crack – or even several – doesn’t make it any less of a plate, does it, lad?_

Thranduil sits back down, eyes Bard, who is still holding the glass with some degree of discomfort, worrying that he might break it.

“Drink your wine,” he tells Bard, who does.

He doesn’t know good wine from piss poor, if he’s being honest with himself, but it doesn’t taste as awful as the stuff they were drinking in those villages on the western front, and so he takes another mouthful.

Thranduil’s watching him still, and something warm flares in Bard’s chest, something that he has a name for but has never considered in the context of his host before now.

“I’ve never really thanked you for all of this.”

Thranduil doesn’t say anything to that, just shakes his head and flicks that almost-smile at Bard again, and the two sit in silence for a while. Thranduil’s pipe is still resting on the arm of his chair, where he left it, and though it has long burnt out the smell of the tobacco remains sweet in the air, the wine a bitter bloom of unidentifiable fruit on his tongue, the ease of this moment enough to make Bard feel tired, but the right sort of tired this time. He could sleep, he thinks to himself, and perhaps even sleep well, but he can’t bring himself to rise, to leave this quiet and unexpected intimacy, this warmth.

Eventually Thranduil began to hum, some strange and lonely song that Bard didn’t know.

It’s a sad sound, and a good sound too.

The flicker in his chest is still there, but it has gentled now, into something that should probably have made him stop a moment and think, but for now he feels too good to worry, and that is such a rare feeling these days that he doesn’t want to fight it.

And so he doesn’t.

The leather is soft beneath his back, the room warm and quiet, the gentle sounds of the creaking house settling around him – his children are safe and warm in the rooms above him, dreaming of horse rides and plum pies and golden summers that Bard has never seen, summers in the country, surrounded by the haze of wildflowers and distant clouds. Eventually he falls asleep in the armchair, too comfortable and unprecedentedly content to stay awake any longer, drifting off in the low light and the comfort of the moment, the empty glass resting against his chest. He doesn’t wake as Thranduil rises, some hours later, even though the cane taps lightly against the floor as it comes close to the chair and takes the glass from him.

And for the first time in so long, he didn’t dream.

He woke just before dawn, the sky peering in through the heavy curtains a dark grey, hazy with the promise of the sunrise. His back is sore and there is a crick in his neck from the awkward position, but he is warm, and feels rested, feels _alive._ The air against his face is cool, smelling of sandalwood and wood polish and pipe smoke, and it was only as he forced his eyes open that he realised he was alone in the library, the looming bookshelves his only company.

He felt, for a moment, almost like himself again.

He sat up carefully, slowly willing himself to stand and return to his bed (where he thought he might be able to sleep again, for even longer) that he realised the warmth had come from Thranduil’s velvet dressing gown, draped across him at some point in the night, when his host must have retired to his own room.

He hesitates for a moment, before standing, and folding it perhaps a little more gently than he needed to, leaving it on the chair.

 

* * *

 

 

Things have changed between them, even though Bard isn’t sure that he would be able to explain why, or how. But the unspoken tension that had been there before has gone, dissipating almost overnight. Thranduil joins them a little more often than he did before, occasionally sitting beside Bard on the bench on the patio on warmer days, watching the children run around, or else joining them in the sitting room in the evening rather than shutting himself away in his rooms or his library, brooding in the dark. He doesn’t join in the conversation all that much, but neither does Bard, really: Thranduil sits and reads whilst Bard drifts off, his mind in a distant place, mud and gunfire.

The spectre of his anger no longer feels directed at Thranduil – it is formless now, meaningless, and in some ways he thinks that makes it harder, having no one that he can direct his rage towards.

Spring comes slowly, despite what he had expected, forcing its way through the lingering damp of winter that you can still feel, on the air, on days when the sun does not make its way out from behind the clouds.

There are buds of leaves appearing on some of the trees now, green shoots pushing through the dark dirt, the promise of flowers to come in their twisting stems. Bard still wonders when he is supposed to be leaving this place, at what point Thranduil is going to finally have enough of Bard and his children’s presence in his house.

But somehow it doesn’t bother him in quite the way that it should.

He watches Legolas teach the other children how to make flower crowns out of the first of the crocuses, the late snowdrops, the early daffodils: they never had flowers in abundance like this back in Manchester, just the occasional bank of earth between the mills and the terraced workhouses, from which ill-looking grass and the occasional daisy would peek if the weather was good. Sigrid looks beautiful, sat there in the long grass with flowers in her hair, laughing at the way that Legolas is blushing as Tauriel passes him a handful of clover flowers.

She’s grown up, he realises, with a sudden and bittersweet clarity – she’s turned sixteen whilst he’s been away, is on the cusp of womanhood. No wonder she has boys trying to court her already.

She doesn’t seem that interested, although he’s starting to suspect that the most determined of her suitors – the one that Thranduil first wrote to him about – might actually be in with a shot. He is the nephew of some other landowner across the valley, a couple of years older than Sigrid, his fair hair a little messy and the scruff of stubble promising to grow into a proper moustache soon. Bard doesn’t know what to think of him, but trusts his daughter’s sense and wisdom enough to know that she’ll make a good decision.

He’s shaken from his thoughts as Tilda rests a flower crown on his head, too, and he smiles at her before pulling her close, pressing a rough kiss against her cheek, the scratch of his stubble making her laugh, both of their crowns knocked askew on their heads. She laughs at him, but doesn’t push him away the way she might have done before the war.

He lets her go, and she runs back to her siblings and friends, and he settles back against the bench, straightening the flower crown with his shaking hand.

When Thranduil comes out to join them he huffs something that might have been a laugh at the sight of Bard’s crown, good humour curling around his mouth for a moment as he settles in beside Bard.

In front of the patio, one of the twisting trees has bloomed, the bare branches suddenly heavy with huge white flowers, tinged with pink and beautiful. It is a good contrast, Bard thinks, to the pale blue of the Spring sky. Tilda had told him that the tree was a magnolia – he likes that word, and the tree itself, the sight of it making him irrationally gratified with life. The breeze almost feels warm, and Bard closes his eyes against it, opening them only to see Thranduil looking at him, something unreadable in his gaze that flushes that same heat in his chest.

He feels content.

It is unexpected, and it feels good.

March arrives, and with it Tilda’s birthday. The weeks seem to fly by, now, far quicker than he ever remembers them doing when he was on the front. He watches Tilda throw her arms around Thranduil when he gives her his gift, and unlike Christmas Bard feels less resentful, less angry, at the extravagance of the event compared to how they once celebrated birthdays at home. The cook has made her a cake, soft sponge with buttercream piped into roses on the top, jam that Tilda herself helped the cook make last year out of the produce from the raspberry canes and lane-side blackberries in the middle.

She is laughing, and she kisses him and Thranduil both, a smear of jam across her cheek and love and happiness in her eyes as she delights over her gifts, over the twists of sherbet lemons and the crème caramels. She has had several birthdays here – this is normal to her now.

And strangely, it is starting to feel normal to him, as well. That thought is almost comforting.

“Love you, Da,” Tilda tells him as she dances over to him, wired and happy and so _alive._

“I love you, little bird,” he tells her, an old nickname from childhood that he hasn’t used in years. She laughs, and picks up his injured arm to wrap around her with his shaking one in an embrace. He doesn’t even mind that it hurts like hell, because her flyaway hair is tickling his neck, her body is warm, and as he glances up he catches Thranduil’s eye, something sad and almost regretful passing through his host’s gaze as it drifts from Bard and Tilda to Legolas.

Bard still doesn’t know what to think of those two and their strange relationship, but later that evening Legolas stops Bard in the hallway, when they are alone.

“I’m glad that you all came here, you know,” he tells Bard without preamble, with the forthrightness that only a fifteen year old who has never been told that he is wrong can have. Bard isn’t sure what to say, so just nods down at Legolas with something of a smile, unsure and thrown by the unexpected opening.

“That’s… good?” he ventures, his uninjured hand beginning to shake: he clenches it to try and stop the quaking, and Legolas pretends not to notice.

“It’s just…” he continues, shuffling a little now. Bard feels a little guilty, though he isn’t sure why, and places his shaking hand on Legolas’ shoulder. To his surprise, the boy swallows, and for a moment turns his face to his shoulder and presses the side of his jaw against Bard’s hand, an unexpected desire for comfort.

Both father and son, Bard thinks, are so distant, so strange – is it just that both of them were longing for affection, for relief, for attention? 

“It’s just that before you came,” Legolas finally continues, quieter now. “Before Sigrid and Tilda and Bain and Tauriel were here, Father never smiled, never really seemed that happy at all. And now you’re here, too, and he seems even happier because of that.”

Bard frowns, not really understanding: Legolas bites his lip.

“Please don’t go,” he blurts out, turning and dashing off in the direction of the sitting room, leaving Bard standing in the corridor for a moment, before following. By the time he catches up and sinks into an armchair Legolas is sat on the floor around a board game with the other children, and he glances up and smiles at Bard, as if they are sharing some secret between the two of them. Bard can only smile back, half-hearted and a little sad.

He can’t promise to stay – children don’t understand the way that adults work. Thranduil is not here to support Bard and his family indefinitely. Bard already owes him too much to let him, even if he wanted to.

How can he ever hope to repay him?

He asks Thranduil that, one day soon after, when the Spring has finally taken a proper hold and the wildflowers have finally begun to appear, alongside the fresh green of new leaves that have finally unfurled. The weak sunlight is spilling through those new leaves in the orchard as they walk through it, Thranduil’s cane sinking slightly into the moss and grass underfoot, Bard occasionally having to prop himself up against a tree and rest for a moment.

It’s a struggle for both of them, walking across twisting roots without a path, but they persevere, even though there is a sheen of sweat growing across Bard’s forehead.

Above them the apple trees are starting to bloom, ready to start growing fruit eventually.

He’s spent more time with Thranduil in the last couple of months: as the winter has slowly thawed so has Bard, towards his host. Now they spend their evenings together in silence, reading or just staring off into the distance, neither of them needing to fill the quiet with conversation. But sometimes they do speak, during long afternoons like this, strange meandering conversations that can lead to anywhere.

Thranduil laughs at Bard’s question, for the first time since Bard has arrived: his hair is lit up in the sunlight and his face is pale from the pain of walking, and something in Bard’s chest tightens, that same warmth that he is beginning to recognise for what it is.

His laughter is unfamiliar, and genuine.

“You haven’t answered the question,” Bard reminds him after a moment, and Thranduil just shook his head.

“There is no answer to give,” Thranduil tells him, his rare smile staying a little longer on his face now than it did when he and Bard first met. “Do not talk of repayment.”

But it is not enough of an answer for him, not really. Not talking about something does not mean that it ceases to exist, nor that the problem is miraculously solved: he doesn’t have a place to go, still hasn’t confided that weight to anyone. When Thranduil eventually asks them to leave, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Who will hire a man with a crippled arm, a man who screams through the night, who struggles to walk?

How will he care for them?

His fears must have been more obvious than he thought, because a few days later Sigrid asked him to go for a walk with her. They make it out of Thranduil’s gardens this time, though Bard has to stop and pause every now and again, and Sigrid leads him down narrow pathways, winding along the drystone walls that mark the boundaries of the farm land. In the distance someone is ploughing a field, ready for planting, and there is a haze of warmth, a distant drone of some kind of machinery that he isn’t familiar with. There are forget-me-nots growing along the banks of the path, bright blues and pinks spilling from the grass and the brown twists of dried out blackberry brambles.

“Something’s wrong,” she says, shooting him a glance out of the corner of her eye, and he sighs at her, reaching down to pull a spring of the blue flowers from the grass, tucking it behind Sigrid’s ear.

“You worry too much,” he told her, gently, and she shook her head.

“I know about the house, Da,” she tells him, shrugging a little as he stared at her in surprise. They had come to a gate, and she stood on the crossbar and swung back and forwards as Bard caught his breath and tried to think of what to say, what to do in the face of this new information.

“How?” he asks eventually, and she gives him a slightly disparaging look.

“I’m not an idiot, Da,” she tells him. “I knew something was wrong when you never mentioned going home, or at least going to pick up some things.” She pulls his father’s watch from her pocket, turning it over in her fingers for a moment, before tucking it back away. Bard’s eye is drawn to the movement, but Sigrid doesn’t even seem to notice that she is doing it, reaching for the one piece of home that she has left.

She shrugs, and looks so much like her mother that for a moment Bard wants to sink to the ground and never rise again, faced with the thought of the people he has loved and lost, the years of his children’s youth that he didn’t see and can never reclaim.

“I wrote to some of our neighbours,” she says, “And none of them wrote back, so I asked Mr Thranduil to find out the list of destroyed property in our area. And of course, our house was on there.”

She doesn’t tell him off for not admitting the truth to her: there is no recrimination in her tone, no anger or disapproval, and in a way that almost makes it worse. She has shouldered this burden like an adult, and that is the last thing that he had wanted her to do. She is a _child_ , for heaven’s sake, will always be his child, and it is supposed to be his responsibility to make sure that she never has to carry more than her load.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, but she waves him off.

“Bain and Tilda don’t know,” she says, and Bard sighs, thankful at least for some small mercy. “But Mr Thranduil does.”

That causes Bard to pause, and Sigrid swings on the gate again, her eyes on the distant haze of clouds forming over the horizon – not dark enough to bring rain, but certainly enough to block out the sun by the time they reach them. It is probably time to turn back, anyway, but Bard cannot bring himself to move. Thranduil knows that they have nowhere to go – no wonder he hasn’t asked Bard to leave yet.

“What are we going to do, Da?” she asks, and he holds out an arm. She jumps down and presses herself against his side, a brief embrace that leaves him feeling inexplicably calmer – she’s started wearing her hair up in the latest fashion, but he nuzzles against it anyway, laughing as she pushes him away in mock protest.

“I’ll sort it out,” he promises, though he doesn’t know how he is going to do that.

But he will, he knows that he will, somehow.

For her, for them.

They take a slow pace back to the house as the wind cools a little tugging at their light jumpers. There are still old leaves mulching underneath the hedgerows, but it smells like Spring, damp and warm and pleasant, the distant dust from the ploughing fields a gentle addition to air.

“How are your nightmares?” she asks as they reach the gate to Thranduil’s gardens, pushing it open to let Bard through: he takes a moment to lean against the wall, but his shaking hand moves just as he rests his weight against it, scraping the skin off his palm. He hisses at the pain, his injured arm closing, in reflex, into a fist against the sting, making the pain even worse. Sigrid takes his scraped hand and kisses the knuckles, looking up at him knowingly.

“I don’t have any,” he lies, as they start up the path again, and now she’s looking at him as if he is a fool, making him feel even worse than before.

_How does she know?_ He wondered to himself as Tauriel calls down to them from a tree she has climbed. _Is it the tired bags under his eyes, the shadows of exhaustion, the haunted way he checks the shadows in a room in the evening as if he is expecting something to leap from them? Or have his screams at night not been as muffled as he thought they were?_

“You should talk to Mr Thranduil,” she tells him, as they follow the meandering path to the patio.

He nods, not quite agreeing, and wondered if he has ever felt this helpless before.

 

* * *

 

“Something troubles you,” Thranduil states, a few nights later, when once again they find themselves in front of the fire in the library, late into the night. They meet here more and more often now, though Bard doesn’t bother going in when the light is off, when it is empty.

It is their wounds that have left them here, the old and the new, both aching and in the process of healing – Bard has taken to flexing the hand of his injured arm, a painful movement. Sometimes it makes his eyes sting with how much it hurts to do, but he relishes in the fact that finally he can move it again, even though it can do little else.

“Aye,” he replies, and he wasn’t planning on saying anything more, but there was something in the way that Thranduil was looking at him, collected and distant but somehow reassuring, as if he already knew the burdens of Bard’s heart and was only waiting for an invitation to take his share of the load.

But he already did know Bard’s burdens, didn’t he?

He clears his throat, and watches the fire.

“I would appreciate,” he says quietly, carefully, “if you would let me know when you want us to leave. If I have a date, I can begin to make arrangements.”

Thranduil looked at him, a strange look that Bard couldn’t place, and for a moment he was afraid that he had overstepped some line between them, had done some irrevocable damage to their tentative friendship, but then he shook his head, and ran a hand through his fine hair, short and slicked back across the crown of his head.

“I have no intention of sending you away.”

Bard sat there, momentarily speechless.

He didn’t know what to think, let alone what to say, and so he remained silent, watching the strangely motionless face of his host as he stared into the fireplace.

“Do you think it is charity, the reason that I will not turn you away?” Thranduil asked, suddenly, and Bard realised that the man had been watching him, studying Bard’s blank expression of surprise. “It isn’t, you know. It has never been.”

“I know how you would feel about that,” he says, before hesitating, a sight which Bard had never thought to see. “At least, I think I know how you would feel about it.”

Bard just nods, still not knowing what to say, and Thranduil bites his lip, for a moment looking so much like his son that Bard blinked, wondering what Thranduil had looked like when he was young.

“I…” Thranduil doesn’t seem to know what to say still, and then he shook his head, looking up at Bard with ill-disguised grief.

He told Bard a story then, one cut short but no less poignant for it. It is a story about a man who married a girl that he loved, and then was sent to war. He thought he would be a hero, but he came home to find that he had lost a wife and gained a son whilst he was away – his house was strange to him now, and he couldn’t walk, could barely even sit up in bed to look at the child that strangers brought in to show him. It was a story about a man who lost and gained in equal measure, but who did not know how to change himself in turn. A man who spent his child’s youth unable to run or play with him, unable even to really speak to him, not knowing how to talk to something so small, not knowing how to express the longing and desperate love he felt for the last remnant of his wife, her last and lingering presence of her on this earth. A man who became a distant father despite himself, never knowing how to talk, how to show his son just how much he cared. The two continued on, growing slowly older and more sad, the house quiet and without life.

Then another war had broken out, and he was sent three children from the city, and suddenly his house was full of laughter again, like it had been years ago, and he had felt finally as if he were able to do something with his life once more. He learnt to love these wild and loud children, was learning slowly how to speak to his own son again through them.

And then a convalescent had come to stay, and Thranduil realised that he finally had a purpose in his life again, even if all it meant was providing food and contentment, a late night fire and company to sit beside.

“So,” he said to Bard, his voice having grown quieter throughout the length of his story, the most he has ever said to Bard in one sitting. “So, this is not a case of you asking to stay – it is me asking you, because if you left then the house will be empty and silent again.”

Bard throat felt tight, and painful.

“And,” Thranduil said, not much more of a whisper now, more vulnerable than Bard could ever have imagined him sounding, “I don’t know how either me or my son could stand it.”

Bard nods, slowly, not knowing what else to say, but he manages to choke out a thank you as Thranduil rises to leave, his cane pressing harder against the floor than normal, a shadow of a grief that Bard is finally beginning to understand across his eyes. Just as Thranduil passes his chair Bard reaches out, his painful arm shaking perhaps for another reason now, and takes hold of his host’s arm. It’s the injured limb, and his grip is weak, barely there, but Thranduil does not pull away, does not shake it off. The sleeve of his dressing gown pulls up as Thranduil lifts his own arm, reaching back, and now Bard can feel the flutter of a pulse under his fingers, quicker than it should be.

He swallows, and it still hurts.

His arm is screaming in agony, but he doesn’t move it, even though it begins to quake.

They watch each other for some strange, singular moment.

Thranduil’s mouth opens, just a little, and Bard’s breath hitches despite himself.

He isn’t sure who moves away first, but one of them must have. He rests his hand against his thigh and watches Thranduil leave, trying to quiet the flurry of warmth in his own chest, the tightness he can’t swallow down, the unexpected rush of feeling.

 

* * *

 

 

A nurse arrives, some weeks later, and Bard does not know what to think when he is told that she is here for him. She’s a patient woman, around his own age, and she talks to him as she moves his arm for him, telling him that she lost one of her own brothers in the war, her father and Grandfather in the war before that, the one they called the Great War, that they said would be the last. War is never ending, he has come to realise – there will always be another, despite what the politicians promise, and the memories of ones that are over linger so long in the minds of those who have been touched by it that they might as well still be going on.

She comes three times a week, makes him practise walking without aid and moving both his hands against the pain, and she is patient, even when he is curt with her. She talks to him all the time, never expecting a response, a well of quiet wisdom spilling over.

It surprises him when she tells him that she’s the sister of the other estate owner across the valley, the one built up from mining profits rather than from ancestral right. It was not what he expected– he had thought, from her tone and her forthrightness, that she had come from a background closer to his than to Thranduil’s, but he supposes that the years she had spent as a nurse in war time might have changed her a little, too.

It takes him even longer to realise that she is the mother of the blonde-haired boy that calls over the wall to Sigrid, the one who brings her wildflowers in great, scraggly bunches (and though she would never admit it, she keeps those wildflowers for the day or two that they last, looking after them with some care, unlike the hot-house flowers that other boys bring her, to which she seems to show little regard. Apparently he had learnt his lesson after realising that she threw away the ones grown under grass that be brought her in the first winter after they had met).

He supposes that Thranduil must have arranged for this care, and wonders why, but he cannot bring himself to question it during their late night conversations by the fire.

With her help his motions become smoother, though still painful, and when she asks him about his dreams, he finds himself telling her, admitting despite himself that they haunt him still, those nights of smoke and ash, of dead men walking and everything he loves burning around him. Part dream, part memory, they hurt him far worse than any physical injury ever could.

She rolls up her sleeve when he is done confessing what almost feels like a sin, and shows him her arm, the great burns that wrap around her skin, leaving it puckered and twisted.

“We who see fire, remember fire,” she says, and her voice is so sad that he forces himself to ask what had happened, although he almost doesn’t want to.

“A competitor,” she admits, “to my Grandfather’s company. He took the men of our house being away as an opportunity to try and rid my family of some of their assets.”

He nods, though he is frowning, and she smiles at him, her eyes as warm a blue as Thranduil’s are cold.

“You dream of dead men, and I dream of dragons,” she says, and she runs her gentle hands over the ruin of Bard’s own right one, her fingers soft against his skin, warm with friendship and understanding. “But after that, after the nurses did so much to care for me, I trained with them. I worked out the rest of the war and found myself again. And then it was over, and I found my last brother bleeding and broken in a hospital, and I took him home, and brought back to the world. I found a man that loved me for my scars, not in spite of them, and have beautiful sons that I thank God every day were not old enough to get drawn into another stupid war.”

Bard nods, because the one thing that he can relate to is the all-consuming love that a parent has for their children, the desire to keep them safe above all else.

“We are the sum of everything that has happened to us,” Dis says, far wiser than Bard will ever be despite the fact that they are of a similar age. “The bad and the good. Our job in life is to not let the bad things that we have been through define who we are afterwards.”

He swallows, and it hurts almost as much as his hand, though for entirely different reasons.

 

* * *

 

 

Bain comes to find him, one day in late April when spring rain was lashing against the windows and you could almost have believed that it was winter again but for the blossom on the trees outside, the blooms taking such a beating in the rain that Bard wonders if there will be any left by the time the clouds pass, or if they will all just be petals against the ground, shreds of ghosts against the bright grass. His son hovers in the doorway for a time before padding over to his father, his footsteps quiet enough that Bard might not have heard him had he not caught the movement in the doorway out of the corner of his eye.

He pretends not to notice, but just as Bain creeps close enough he reaches out and grabs him around the middle, making his son jump and huff.

It’s a game they used to play, in their old house, much smaller and more prone to creaking than this one, and Bain rarely managed to creep up on his father. They haven’t done it since Bard returned, but it is a familiar and unexpected spark of the home that they have lost.

Bard presses his face against his son’s sternum, smiling against Bain’s shirt, for a moment. Sitting down as he is now, Bain looms above him, and he wonders when his son grew so tall, and how long it will be until he reaches his father’s height, or perhaps even surpasses it.

“What can I do for you?” he asks, as he pulls away, and Bain just shrugs, settling down on the sofa next to his father, not quite close enough so that their shoulders are touching, as if he is unsure. Bard shuffles just a little closer, so the lines of their forearms are pressed together, relishing for a moment that contact.

“What are the rest of them up to?” he asks again when Bain says nothing, just turns his hands over in his lap, the way he used to do when he was a child and felt particularly shy.

“Oh, Sig is reading – she says it’s a book but we know she’s got the letters from that lad across the way hidden in there, ‘cause she keeps blushing – and Legolas is teaching Tilda to make flowers out of paper. Dunno where Tauriel has gone, she disappeared after breakfast.”

“Ah,” Bard replies unhelpfully, trying not to consider his daughter blushing over reading letters. Tauriel was no surprise, though – she was probably outside, would come home soaked after a day spent by herself in the rain, the long spill of her auburn hair dark with moisture, twisting it around her pale fists to get the water from it. She never seemed to catch a cold from those days out, and it was one of the few times she didn’t ask for company – none of them asked her what passed through her mind on those days spent alone, out who-knows-where. All the children had lost their mother, but she was the only one who understood the totality of loss. For all Thranduil’s distance, for all Bard’s absence for the last few years, the other children still had one parent, here and warm and alive, still had the promise that there would always be someone there to raise them up, to fix their problems large and small, to love them unconditionally.

He should spend more time with Tauriel, he realised. It was easy to forget her need for love, her maturity and her polite smiles leading others to overlook her from time to time, but perhaps in spite of all that she needed a parent – or at least, the warmth of someone willing to fill in the role in everything but name – as much as the rest.

Perhaps even more.

“And you don’t want to join in your sister’s reading, or flower-making?” he asked, already anticipating Bain’s screwed up face.

“Nah,” his boy said, stretching out his long and gangly limbs in front of them. Bard had been just like that at his age – all wire and no bulk, long and awkward without the comfortable heft of broad shoulders and muscle that came later on.

He feels a surge of familiar love, and presses his arm a little more against his son. He’s shaking, slightly, though he hadn’t even really noticed before now, but his son doesn’t really seem bothered by that.

He doesn’t press his son for any more, the two of them sitting in silence for some time. The air is cooler than it has been the last few weeks, and eventually he tugs over the big blanket that one of the girl’s must have left there this morning, shaking it out over the both of them. They could almost have been at home, he thinks, all curled together in the evening because it was too cold not to, but not minding the bitter air that nipped at their fingers because they were all there with each other, love persevering against the weather.

“Does it hurt?” Bain asks eventually, Bard’s arm still shaking between them. It isn’t something his children ask him all that often, and he supposes that they simply try not to think about it.

He shrugged.

“Aye,” he tells his son, not willing to lie. “Though it hurts less than it did even a month ago.”

Bain nods.

“I’ll be grown soon,” he tells his Da, his voice sure and deeper than Bard ever remembers is being. “And when I am, I’ll look after us, you and me and the girls. You don’t have to worry about that.”

His heart feels like his might burst through his chest, but all he knows to do is reach out for his son, his arm sore but not as bad as it might have once been. His finger’s skim his son’s cheek, still smooth, and tucks Bain’s head in against his shoulder, keeping him there with the press of a kiss against his hair.

“You don’t need to worry about any of that, lad,” he tells him, as gentle as he can be. “I’ll always be there, looking after you all.” But then he remembers being this age himself, his mother’s lungs too bad to any real work and his own Da struggling, remembers the helplessness and the confusion that comes from not quite being an adult but wanting to be grown enough to help, the bitterness that comes from parental denial. “But when you do grow up, in many years, I will gladly accept your help, _if that is what you want._ But before all of that we have to find something that you want to do, not something that you have to do, alright?”

Bain nods, though Bard can only feel it, not see it, and the two of them settle back, tucked under the blanket, watching the rain outside beat its steady course.

Some hours later, as the daylight is beginning to dim a little, Tauriel passes the doorway: she has changed, but her hair is still a damp rope down her back. She catches his eye, and he nods at her, lifting a corner of the blanket.

She hesitates for a while, but does come to them. She doesn’t curl up against Bard’s side like Bain has, who has drifted off to sleep at some point, but she does tuck her legs up, sitting alongside them, and there is something strange in her face, pale and delicate – something that is somehow both close to joy and to sorrow.

_More_ , Bard thinks to himself as he finds himself following his son in drifting into a light doze. _I’ll do more for her, from now on. For all of them._

 

* * *

 

 

“I know you tell me that it isn’t charity,” Bard blurts out, one late night in early May. The nights are so much shorter now, the dark hours that they share feeling so much more precious because of it, and Thranduil seems to agree, for now they meet more often than they ever have before, and not always in the library. Sometimes he finds Thranduil in the sitting room, or the parlour, and sometimes now it is Thranduil who finds him. Their ease has only grown, tiny steps at a time, but Bard still finds himself embarrassed by how abruptly he had blurted that out.

“I mean,” he continues, trying to right himself as Thranduil’s face begins to pull into something that might develop into a frown, given enough time. “What I mean to say, is that I know you said that me and mine living here isn’t charity, but it still feels like it, to me. I’ve worked all my life, and despite not being… as capable as the man that I was, I cannot simply stay here and rely just on you for the rest of my days.”

Thranduil seems about to protest, but Bard shakes his head, determined for once that it will be him that finishes this conversation, him that steers his, as solidly as he had once steered boats down those old canals, the water brown and filthy, the boats even worse.

“It comes down to pride,” he says, and he _feels_ the bur of his accent thicken as he repeats the words that he had heard his own father say so many times, every time, in fact, that a kindly face had tried to help them in their struggles.

Thranduil sits back in his chair, and there is a tightness around his jaw, something imperceptible in his gaze.

“I have already expressed to you that I would not want you or your children to leave,” he began, but Bard cut him off.

“I’m not saying that we have to go,” he says, and with a strange and burning bitterness he realises that he is saying that because he does not _want_ to go, not in the slightest. “But I need to do something to earn my keep.”

Thranduil glares at him, for just a moment, before the expression softens back to his usual mask.

“Very well,” he replies, though it doesn’t sound anywhere near as calm as he usually does.

Bard begins to suspect that he has crossed a line between them that he had not even known was there, because now Thranduil is forcing himself to his feet, moving over to the low table with the decanter of red wine, pouring himself a glass and standing to take a sip, not nearly as refined as he usually is. This is Thranduil angry, Bard realises distantly as he stands too, not knowing what to do or what there is to say. This is Thranduil at a loss, and bitter too, and it shatters some of the last and lingering feeling of distance that still lies between them.

“Thranduil,” he begins, but then his host turns to look at him, and there is something almost wild in the way his eyes catch the firelight, in the sweep of his fair hair, pushed back from his face, in the way his fist tightens against his cane. It isn’t a wildness that Bard knows or even understands, but he can recognise it – it is the wildness of brambles overtaking stone walls, of tree roots forcing themselves through the earth, of the scream of foxes in the night. It’s a contained wild, so tamed that you might not notice it, but under his calm and his refinement it lingers still, in rage and carelessness, ready to overtake him.

Thranduil, he realises, balances as precariously between the turmoil of his heart and the carefulness of his actions as much as Bard does.

“That is the first time you have ever said my name,” he tells Bard, and there is a deceptive stillness in him now, as if he were some great stag, hovering between fleeing and attacking, antlers raised and eyes alert. “In all this time, you have never said it.”

“I…” Bard begins, and then Thranduil looks away, into the fire.

“I did not mean to offend,” he tries again, and Thranduil says nothing, does nothing but continue to look away.

Bard sighs, but he is starting to feel angry too, not at Thranduil or even at himself, but at this whole thing, at the misunderstanding and the walls that he can almost _feel_ fall back into place between them, the ones that have taken so long to fall down, and its hurts, in a very real way, to feel them go back.

“I want to stay here,” he almost spits out, a flare of anger and desperation and sadness welling up inside him that has to come loose, that he has to put words to, because he is afraid, in that moment, that if he does not they will set him aflame, that he will burn in them. “God knows I never thought I would, but I don’t want to leave.”

Thranduil does look at him now, and that _feeling,_ God, that flurry in his chest that Bard has never wanted to think about is back, and stronger than ever, and he takes a step closer to Thranduil, and then another, to this lonely, angry man that has saved him, that he has saved in turn, though neither of them have words enough to bring that to life between them.

“I’m _not_ going. I _can’t_ go. You’re the…” And he stops, then, because he doesn’t know how he is going to finish that sentence, what even it is that he really means.

What is Thranduil, to him?

He’s the man that took Bard’s children in, and loved them as well as Bard does, that treated them as family rather than guests. He is the man that wrote letters to a stranger on the front, with nothing forcing him to. He’s the man who wrote letters, yes, the letters that kept Bard going when he thought that he was going to die, not from enemy fire but from exhaustion. He’s the man that brought Bard home when he was at his lowest, the man that gave him a bed and food and warmth and shelter. He’s the man who understands Bard’s dreams, who never presses him to speak of them, because he knows how deep those currents of grief run. He’s the man who likes sweets and loves his son, and doesn’t ever have the right words to express that love. He’s the man who found a wounded soldier and took him home, giving him everything that he might ever need to heal. He’s the man who grows fruit trees and orders the gardeners to leave the wildflowers growing. He’s the man who doesn’t care when the boys make flower crowns and the girls climb trees, although there are many parents who wouldn’t stand for either.

He’s the man who bathed a stranger, who washed the blood and death off Bard’s skin until he was as close to being clean as he ever would be again, as close to a redemption as any soldier can hope to find themselves.

He’s just another man – another sad, tired, desperate man, searching for something that he doesn’t even understand.

Just like Bard, really.

“I can’t leave you,” Bard finds himself saying, and his voice is quieter now. “ _We_ can’t leave you.”

Because that’s true as well, isn’t it? His children love Thranduil now, and that have already had enough taken from them in their short little lives.

Thranduil is staring at him again now, and in this light his eyes were almost grey, the grey of heavy clouds waiting to break, and Bard is breathing heavily even though all he’s been doing is standing still, and there is a tightness in his chest that he has a name for, a name he’s only ever used for a tiny collection of people before, a name that makes him think of being undone, of desperation.

“I don’t want you to leave,” Thranduil says, reconfirms. “Stay with us. Stay with all of us. That’s what it means. Not just my house, not just me, but my son, my ward, my life. My nightmares, too.”

“Aye,” Bard replies, not needing to remind Thranduil that he is as much of a package deal as his host is – children and scars and nightmares of his own, too. “Cracked plates,” he adds, and Thranduil blinks at him, temporarily thrown, but he doesn’t explain himself, just shakes his head, and there is that quirk of a smile at the corner of Thranduil’s mouth, the one that appears so rarely but is so beautiful when it does.

And then one of them is moving, and he thinks that it might be him, and his hands are shaking as he reaches for Thranduil, as they move together, caution gone, and he wonders for a moment what a heart attack must feel like, for surely this is it, surely no body was ever made to stand this much raw _feeling._

But Thranduil’s mouth finds his, hot and heady and full of the flavour of the wine that he had been drinking, and his ruined arm can only rest against the strong lines of Thranduil’s back: any more would be too much, and already this feels as if it is going to end him. His other hand though – it is still shaking, but not enough to stop Bard from reaching for hair, for the curve of a jaw, for anything that he can.

The sweetness of it, the richness of it, the fulfilment of a want that had been lying so deep that he almost had not understood that it was there: all of it feels so much, perhaps even too much, but he doesn’t stop kissing him, doesn’t move from the warmth where their bodies are pressed together, does not back away.

“God,” he hears himself mutter, his voice thick, but then his shifts, just enough to unbalance them: he hadn’t even realised that Thranduil was resting so much weight on him, the cane limp at their sides, and it is enough to shake the moment, enough for them to draw away from each other – enough for a sudden dart of fear to worm its way through Bard’s haze.

He looks, almost desperate, only to find a silent confirmation in Thranduil’s eyes, a similar question, and all he has to do is nod, and the fear is gone.

_Cracked plates,_ he thinks again as he rests his forehead against Thranduil’s. _Lots of weak points, chipped around the edges, lots of places where they might have broken along the way. But still whole, despite that. Still just as much a plate._

He mutters that last part out loud, and Thranduil shakes his head a little, warmth and an understanding passing through his gaze, remembering Bard’s earlier comment.

“I’ll write to some people,” he says, quietly, “make inquiries about work for you.” Bard can feel the warmth of Thranduil’s breath against his collarbone, soft and damp, and he closes his eyes.

“Thank you,” he replies, his voice a little hoarse.

 

* * *

 

 

There is a village, out somewhere between moorland and city, nestled in a valley, and it has been there for as long as anyone can remember. There is a post office and a church, and fewer sons that there had been there before the war, before either war.

But the people are hardy, and so they wear their grief with all the dignity that they have to spare, and go about their business.

There is an old house at one end, and in it lives a man with silver threaded through his hair, a man with scars across his face who never used to leave his house much unless his sister made him. He lives with his nephews, bright young things who are always laughing, and now-a-days he does go out more than before, makes the long and winding walk down to the local tea shop. He doesn’t much care for tea, or for cake, though the rations are finally lifting enough to make some truly luscious things. No, he goes for conversation with the man who runs the place, the man with copper-coloured hair and a sad little war orphan at his hip… but that is another story, for another day.

When this man makes his walk in and out of the village, he passes the train station both going and coming. It isn’t a large one – they have trains passing through four times a day, and that is all. He had known the name of the old station master, but he had been sent off to the war, and though he doesn’t know the man who took over some years later, he does nod in recognition when they catch each other’s eyes.

The man has scars running up one arm, just like he does across one side of his face, and these days the new station-master tends to keep his shirtsleeves rolled up, as if they don’t worry him quite as much as they had once done.

His sister had helped the man, some years before, and told him that he was a good man, a man that loved his children, that was just searching for a place in this world that would have him.

He understands that.

He loves his own nephews with an intensity that scares him sometimes, and speaking of those nephews, sometimes they’ll stroll across the valley themselves, to talk and tease with the children of another house – though none of them are quite as much children as they had once been. One of his boy's has his father’s blonde hair and the other his mother’s dark, and they are a striking pair, though both of them will quake still at the glare that tends to be levelled at them from one of the men that acts as the father of those children across the valley– he has a stern look and fine features, and his nephews tend to disappear again pretty quickly when he appears at the door.

The girls think it is funny, know that he does it more because he can than because he feels like he needs to.

There are a pair of boys in that house, too, of a similar age. One loves his father unconditionally, and the other is coming to learn – gradually, as the frost of their lives continues its slow thaw – that his father loves him, too. It might still not be too late to undo the damage that their years of loneliness have caused, not now there are other people here to make sure that the warmth does not pass.

And it is a warmth – that slow and steady warmth that you can feel when you press your hand to the ground in the early days of spring, that warmth that means that the world is coming back to life, that soon the sun will return, the warmth that makes you believe in the turning of the seasons too – because if the dirt can hope for sunlight, then so can you.

And at the end of the day, as that same sun begins to lower itself to the cradle of night, the station master returns home. Most of what he does involves overseeing crates getting loaded and unloaded off the trains, and directing the few weary travellers that need it where to go – though the thing that he enjoys most about his job is the fact that most of the people that get off the trains are people coming home, who light up at the sight of the familiar slate rooftops, the gentle slopes of the valley, the fields and the smell of ploughed earth in the air.

This railway once took his children away from him, took them from the place that they had known, the place that they had loved, to the arms of a stranger.

But now it was home to him too, this land that he could never have imagined.

And so he locks up the station after the last train of every evening, and some days it is hard, because the shaking never quite goes away, and there is one hand that still can’t do all that much, if he is going to be honest with himself. So sometimes he fumbles, and he drops the key, but there doesn’t tend to be anyone around, so he can swear all he likes in the distinctive accent that sets him aside from the rest of the people here, and their gentler lilt. It all gets done in the end, anyway.

He makes his way home.

He likes the sound of that: home.

The pathways lead him along the side of fields, past the old war memorial, through a cluster of trees towards the edge of the village. He’s a little slow going, but he has come to appreciate this time of peace at the end of his day, and he knows that his feet will lead him back eventually. When they do, it is to a large house, sprawling and surrounded by trees – bare boughs kissing the sky in the winter, fat blossoms on the magnolias in the spring, bright green leaves in the summer, that slowly turn to a riot of colour in the autumn.

It should never have been his, and yet, it is.

There are five children, and each day it changes which see him first. What does not change is their greetings – enthusiastic, loud, happy. They’re growing, in height as well as maturity, but they’ll always be his children, whether they want to be or not. His oldest girl is already talking about training to be a nurse: his son is talking about education, something that Bard would never have been able to provide for him before now. His youngest girl is still a riot of laughter and invention, still his singing little bird. Then there is his red-haired dreamer, who still goes out in the rain and sneaks out at night to watch the stars, though he suspects that the dark-haired boy across the valley joins her sometimes, now. And then their blonde boy, so full of sadness that still holds its grip, who talks about being a soldier – he is the one that keeps both father’s up at night.

They’ve seen too much to ever want that life for him, but all the boy has ever seen are victories, and people who return from war. Despite their scars, he doesn’t truly understand, and it is his life to lead, his choices to make, not theirs.

He knows that soon enough first one and then another child will leave, that eventually they will all have gone, and already his chest aches with that knowledge, a parent’s own personal grief.

But for now, they are all here, and even when they are gone, he won’t be alone.

The master of the house nods at him as he arrives. He nods in return.

They eat dinner together, whichever child has the most exciting story to tell dominating the conversation, the two adults sat at either end occasionally catching each other’s eye and sharing a look, something that is part respect and part understanding, but more than that too. And later on in the night, when the house has fallen quiet, the two of them will find each other, perhaps in the library but perhaps elsewhere, too.

They still have nightmares. There is still smoke and the voices of dead men, planes flying overhead to search for his children. There are still bloody hospitals that no one ever arrives to take him from, there are still wreckage and landmines that he stepped first onto, not his friends.

Sometimes they both still wake up screaming. Sometimes it is even on the same night. There are mornings when their old wounds wake them in such pain that they wonder how they will ever rise and see the rest of the day. Not all hurts can be comforted, not all wounds fully healed. They have enough scars between them that they will never forget that.

But they are not alone, not now.

They have each other, they have a family, they have the morning sunshine spilling through the window of a bedroom that they both find themselves in together, more often than not. They have company in the long sleepless nights, the warmth of a body pressed against theirs, the assurance of love that grows not despite scars, but because of them.

Bard wakes with an aching hand most mornings, to the sound of his children slowly rising to greet the day.

There is tea to be drunk downstairs, toast covered in the jam that his children make each autumn.

There are the wisps of fine, blonde hair across his shoulder, tangled in the stubble that he never quite remembers to shave.

There is always a new day, and enough of them are sweet that he knows, without any doubt-

They are home.


End file.
